Comment 4 for bug 657489

Thank you Michael for a good description, it probably saved me from ending up with an unbootable system.

I had the same symptoms in Maverick after activating the proposed repository and installing grub-pc_1.98+20100804-5ubuntu3.1_i386. My reason to segmentation faults wasn't a PnP wireless modem, but a normal USB memory stick. Apparently it wasn't somehow properly unmounted and it showed in /dev/disk/by-id/ even though the stick was removed from the computer. After plugging the stick back in and unmounting it, I could do a clean 'dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc'.