Trouble upgrading Squeeze

[Marc Shapiro <marcnshap@gmail.com>]

I have Sqeeze on my laptop and have not done an upgrade in quite some
time.  Today there were 459MB of updates to DL.  I said OK to the
upgrade and the download went just fine.  Then the actual update
began.  I got a message about lilo and large memory usage.  The laptop
is only a couple years old, so I answered 'Yes' to let it use the
large memory option and rerun lilo.  So far, so good.  The update
continued and I went to do other things.  This was going to take a
while.  When I came back, nothing was happening on the screen.  The
computer was not locked, but the update had ground to a halt with
several messages from syslogd which I should have copied down, but
didn't.  My bad.  I tried to Ctl-C out of aptitude.  If I remember
correctly, that was successful, but when I tried to restart aptitude I
got a message that it had not finished configuring packages (what a
surprise) and I should run:

dpkg --configure -a

I did so, and it continued for a while, then hung up with the message:

Setting up fuse-utils (2.8.4-1.1) ...
creating fuse group...
udev active, skipping device node creation.

I was unable to Ctl-C out of this and closed the xterm and restarted
it.  I then tried to rerun the above dpkg command, but had to remove
the lock file first.  I have run the dpkg command several times, now.
Sometimes I have needed to remove the lock file, and sometimes not.
Each time it has configured a few files, then attempted to configure
fuse-utils and gotten stuck.  The last time, it went straight to
setting up fuse-utils.  Maybe everything else is done?

Now I am afraid to power down and reboot, since it presumable updated
lilo back at the beginning, but I notice that after that, it tried to
install grub, but perhaps did not succeed, since after finding the
kernel and initrd the next line was the single word 'Killed'.

Is it safe to reboot?  If not, what should I do to get the system back
into a stable state?  Since this is a netbook, I don't have a floppy,
or CD drive to boot a rescue disk from, so I really need to be
confident that it will boot up.  It is running OK now, but a reboot
has me worried.

Any help?

Marc