Comment 15 for bug 807974

Perhaps you have a buggy virtualization environment (which would qualify as a "hardware problem")? Or maybe you have some library being LD_PRELOADed in your environment which breaks things? Honestly, *no one* else is reporting such dpkg segfaults, so this is not a widespread problem. You've pointed out some differences between the two systems where you encounter the issue; I think it's time for you to look for what's the same between your two systems but different from a typical install / environment.