Comment 3 for bug 84284

confirmed on my Thinkpad T42 and T40.

<snip here>
Unpacking replacement tomboy ...
Preparing to replace usplash 0.4-39 (using .../usplash_0.4-40_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement usplash ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libusplash0_0.4-40_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

dist-upgrade again yields:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  usplash: Depends: libusplash0 but it is not installed

apt-get install -f solves all problems