dpkg fails with: "Processing was halted because there were to many errors"

[Bruce <bestb@sympatico.ca>]

I seem to have completely messed up this Debian install.

I had recently done an update which had renedered X inaccessible on my 
brother-in-law's laptop (a Sony Vaio SR17. The video card (S3 Savage IX) is 
tricy to get working with X, at least for me). The machine had been working 
with Xfree 4.01, but in the upgrade I managed to somehow lose his prior 
XF86Config-4 file during the upgrade. This meant trying to figure out the 
settings for this machine all over again, which I have been utterly unable to 
do, despite trying all the automatic configuration tools, and copying 
settings from every XF86Config file for this or other Savage IX machines I 
could find on the net; no matter what settings I changed, X would not start. 
X would try and start, but only show up briefly  then black screen, repeat, 
then eventually quit.

Eventually (after several nights of getting absolutely nowhere) I figured I 
should remove X altogether and then start again with a clean system. Of 
course, I wasn't paying attention to the battery, and 1/2 way through my 
"apt-get remove xserver-xfree86 xlibs", the battery dies. Oops.

Three manual fsck /dev/hdax later, I was back at my command line prompt. I 
then tried to pick up where I had left off in removing X. Unfortunately, 
apt-get won't let me remove anything anymore; it always ends with 

	dpkg: error processing nowebm (--remove):
	 files list file for package 'libarts1-qt' is missing final newline
	Errors were encountered while processing:
	 nowebm	
	Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
	E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

So package nowebm or libarts1-qt are somehow screwed up. I try

	dpkg -r --force-all nowebm

and get the exact same error (less the last line).

>From what I understand, the above dpkg command should remove partially 
installed broken packages no matter what - isn't that command designed 
specifically for this purpose?? A command of last resort?? If that doesn't 
remove the package, what will??

At this point, it only makes sense to me to just purge the whole shooting 
match and do a brand new install of Woody. But I would be happy to be proven 
wrong.

Bruce