unable to update update-manager-core

[Mike Kupfer]

I tried installing a recent set of 11.10 (Oneiric) updates, and I kept
getting this failure on update-manager-core:

dpkg: ../../src/archives.c:985: tarobject: Assertion `r == stab.st_size' failed.

I saw the failures with both Update Manager and apt-get.  I have a copy
of the log from "sudo apt-get upgrade" if anyone wants it.  What was
particularly frustrating about this is that it was difficult to recover
from.  dpkg wanted me to do a reinstall before removing
update-manager-core, but reinstall would fail with this same assertion
failure.  I ended up doing 

    dpkg -r -force-remove-reinstreq update-manager-core

The system is a 32-bit VirtualBox guest, running on a 64-bit 11.10 host.

Two questions:

1. Was there a better way to handle this?

2. Should I file a bug?  I saw filesystem corruption (long list of
   complaints from e2fsck after the upgrade failure), so I don't know if
   I was seeing a problem with the packaging software, the filesystem
   (ext4), or VirtualBox.  I didn't have any problems with the
   corresponding updates on the host.

thanks,
mike