aptitude basically unusable: what happened?

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

  I used to use aptitude for most of the package manging activities,
which mostly meant doing equivalent of apt-get update && apt-get
dist-upgrade.

  lately (few month) the aptitude became completely usuable:

  package screen: I only see few packages in package tree, e.g. the
Installed packages branch should have  a LOT of packages, however it has
only 10 packages.

  upgrade screen (screen you get into when you press 'g'): there should
be a list of new/held/removed/updated packages. however, there is
nothing there, the screen is empty.

  it looks like it got worse gradually, e.g. long ago it worked very
well, later on it started to put a huge number of packages on hold for
no apparent reason (apt-get wouldn't show them as being on hold,
pressing '+' changed the state to 'i' with no problems) and now it does
not work at all.

  I didn't see any bugs related to these problems, is it possible that
there is something wrong with my system/my using of aptitude or is
nobody using it?

  TIA

	erik