package base-files 4.0.0ubuntu5 failed to install/upgrade: read error on stdin at conffile prompt

Binary package hint: base-files

daily adept-notifier updates failed, strg-digimon crashed but could not report crash, cited obsolete packages as listed next.
did sudo apt-get upgrade poppler-utils, lsb-base, libxml2, libdbus-1-3, libx11-data, dbus-x11, libx11-6, ncurses-bin, libpoppler2, libncurses5, libbz2-1.0, x11-common, libdb4.4, fontconfig-config, dbus, libfontconfig1.

Prompted that it would install additional packages and the anticipated disk space...I did not observe whether base-filesX was in that list or not.

most went in fine, prompting to replace/keep conf as appropriate, then reported unsuccessful base-files4.0.0ubuntu5.

ProblemType: Package
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Oct 8 08:47:09 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.10
DpkgTerminalLog:

ErrorMessage: read error on stdin at conffile prompt
Package: base-files 4.0.0ubuntu5
PackageArchitecture: i386
SourcePackage: base-files
Title: package base-files 4.0.0ubuntu5 failed to install/upgrade: read error on stdin at conffile prompt
Uname: Linux rockhopper 2.6.22-12-generic #1 SMP Sun Sep 23 18:11:30 GMT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux