suidregister problem with apt-get upgrade

[Tomislav Renic <tomislav@pc-emery3.geoeng.umanitoba.ca>]

Here's a problem for you guys...

I tried apt-get update; upgrade this morning on a potato system, and when it came time to install the libc6 package, it exited with an error, telling me that the error came from the postinst script.  Apparently suidregister returned "permission denied".  Here's a copy of the output:

pc-emery3:/var/cache/apt/archives# dpkg -i libc6_2.1.2-4.deb
(Reading database ... 40503 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace libc6 2.1.2-4 (using libc6_2.1.2-4.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libc6 ...
Setting up libc6 (2.1.2-4) ...
Current default timezone: 'Canada/Central'.
   Local time is now:      Mon Sep 27 09:34:44 CDT 1999.
   Universal Time is now:  Mon Sep 27 14:34:44 UTC 1999.
   Run `tzconfig' if you wish to change it.
   /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6.postinst: /usr/sbin/suidregister: Permission denied
   dpkg: error processing libc6 (--install):
   subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
   Errors were encountered while processing:
   libc6                                                                          

This is after trying to install the package just using dpkg after apt-get failed on me.

 Any ideas?  Since this happened, my machine has been pretty unusable...

Thanks for the help, and please reply to this address as I only subscribe to the digest of debian-user