locale problem

[Mike McClain <mike.mcclain@nowhere.net>]

    Ever since installing Sarge last month I've been plagued with these
locale error messages from perl apps like mandb & syslogd-listfiles.

locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

or

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = "en_US:en_GB:en",
        LC_ALL = "en_US",
        LANG = "en_US"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

    This when LANG, LANGUAGE & LC_ALL are indeed set as shown above
in the environment.

mike@deb31:~> echo $LANG $LANGUAGE $LC_ALL
en_US en_US:en_GB:en en_US

I finally got this to go away using the following steps:
    mike@deb31:~> dpkg -P localepurge
    mike@deb31:~> apt-get install locales localeconf
    after configuration,
    mike@deb31:~/tmp> cp /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive .
    mike@deb31:~> dpkg -P locales localeconf
    mike@deb31:~/tmp> md /usr/lib/locale/
    mike@deb31:~/tmp> mv locale-archive /usr/lib/locale/
    mike@deb31:~> apt-get install localepurge

I'm sure I took the long route and hope one of you can tell me what the 
easy way would have been.

TIA,
Mike