I got rid of it! Here is what I did: 1. Removed the symlinks in /etc/rc#.d 2. Placed strategic exit 0 in update-rc.d and invoke=rc.d scripts 3. Created fake /var/run/postgresql/8.1-main.pid" and /usr/share/postgresql/8.1/tsearch_data files since it returned errors about them missing. 4. Finally dpkg -P 5. Restored the update-rc.d and invoke-rc.d scripts. Nice thing about Debian that everything is done with text scripts. But ... Yuk!