Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation?
disk failure caused corrupted files including /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
ineffective)?
A complete reinstall of the relevant binary packages did nothing to stop
segfaults on startup (including libc) but removal of the pkgstates package
restored aptitude to a functional state.
This is a very minor security issue. Sorry for the largefile flag (unrelated
bug in reportbug-gtk).