UBUNTU Noob_Synaptic error

[Chapper]

Installed Feisty 3 days ago so am ignorat about most things Linux. Zillions of ?'s to come I'm sure
Was downloading a LOT of patches in Synaptic when it hung on EMIX (I think). Otherwise it was doing fine.
After about an hour I gave up & restarted the PC which I guess is a NO NO for Linux.
Tried to open Synaptic and got the "dkg configure a" error and enter that. A series of choices come up & I entered aptitude, none of the other commands would work for me, a screen comes up where I clicked on several buttons which did nothing.
Enter "sudo gedit /var/lib/dpkg/status" and a list of 2 million patches comes up. I scanned about 50 & gave up, not having 2 weeks to go thru all the list to delete any corrupted patch.
REALLY would like to have access to Synaptic so what in hell do I do now?
I want to persevere but am just about ready to reinstall but shouldn't have to if I just knew what to do.
PLEEZ help me. I know a bunch of you have been using UBUNTU a long time and are proficient.
THX

[Chapper]

Ignore my post above. I reinstalled UBUNTU

[KarmaKiller]

Ahhh....

[Xeroid]

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Mepis installs usually only take me about 15 minutes. So, if you run into a major issue (which is pretty uncommon), it's usually easier to just reinstall.

Sounds like your mirror went down right in the middle or your update.