#How can I recover debian?

Sorry that this is off topic but I cannot find out where to ask....


My 32bit sebian system is in a mess; not sure how it got like this but I 
cannot installfixes or anything.

transcript is from apt-get

......
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 125455 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace base-files 7.1wheezy4 (using 
.../base-files_7.1wheezy5_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement base-files ...

At this stage it just hangs -- I have waited hours or minutes but always I 
see

# ps ax | grep dpk
  7141 pts/1    Ds+    0:02 /usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 17 --unpack 
--auto-deconfigure /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_7.1wheezy5_i386.deb
  7148 pts/1    S+     0:00 dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_7.1wheezy5_i386.deb
  7149 pts/1    Z+     0:00 [dpkg-deb] <defunct>
  7150 pts/1    S+     0:00 dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_7.1wheezy5_i386.deb

The defunct process is always there.

How do I get back to sanity?  On or off list...please as thisis getting to 
me

==John ff