[Nottingham] Removing broken deb

[David Luff]

Hi All,

I'm currently stuck with a very broken openoffice.org package following an ill-advised attempt to mix packages from stable, testing and unstable on one system.  I'd like to completely remove it (and install the binaries manually), and have tried both apt-get remove openoffice.org and apt-get -f install (at apt's suggestion), but get stuck with:

root at DJBC:/etc/apt# apt-get -f install
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  openoffice.org 
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 816  not upgraded.
4 packages not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 29.0MB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y
dpkg: error processing openoffice.org (--remove):
 Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should
 reinstall it before attempting a removal.
Errors were encountered while processing:
 openoffice.org
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Attempting a reinstall per suggestion from dpkg does not work.

Could anyone give me some pointers as to where to go from here?

More generally - am I correct in thinking that there's no way to gracefully downgrade all the packages I have from unstable to testing using apt?

Cheers - Dave