I missed this message until just now, thanks so much for all the info I snipped out, I'm going to try to understand it now.aptitude-create-state-bundle doesn't apparently exist on my system -- was this a relatively recent addition to aptitude? (it may have been a year or slightly longer since I've upgraded aptitude)
Actually, if you have a way to post large files on the internet, it would be interesting if you could run "aptitude-create-state-bundle snapshot.tar.bz2" and then let me know how to get access to it; then I might be able to reproduce your problems here and find out exactly what's happening. Daniel