removing badly-broken package

[Bob Nielsen <nielsen@primenet.com>]

After a recent upgrade of some potato packages, xcontrib is in a very
broken state where I can neither upgrade nor remove it. 

dpkg reports:

$ dpkg -l xcontrib
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name            Version        Description
+++-===============-==============-============================================
pHR xcontrib        3.3.2-5.1      XFree contributed clients.

Trying to upgrade causes the post-removal script to do something which
grabs all the memory and swap in my computer and ends up segfaulting. 
dpkg --force-remove-reinstrq also makes this happen.  

There must be some way to manually remove all traces of xcontrib and try
installing it again, but I haven't found any mention of how to
accomplish this.  Can someone please point me in the right direction? 

tia,

Bob

-- 
Bob Nielsen                 Internet: nielsen@primenet.com
Tucson, AZ                  AMPRnet:  w6swe@w6swe.ampr.org
DM42nh                      http://www.primenet.com/~nielsen