can't finish update: dpkg hangs installing xulrunner

[guy keren]

On Sun, 2011-05-08 at 17:04 -0700, Michael Shiloh wrote:
> apt-get update hangs at
> 
> 	Setting up xulrunner-1.9.1
> 
> I can kill this, but then I can't finish the update because it says that 
> dpkg was interrupted. Trying to let dpkg repair with
> 
> 	sudo dpkg --configure -a
> 
> hangs setting up xulrunner so I'm stuck.
> 
> Any ideas?

what does strace tell you?

i.e. run the program under 'strace -f -o /tmp/somefile.txt dpkg ...'

and when it hangs - look in the file /tmp/somefile.txt, and see what is
it waiting for.

--guy