See also bugs #73081 and #73082, which are pretty much a duplicate of the rest of my comment:
I upgraded a dapper installation to edgy using gksu “update-manager -c”. To clean up afterwards, I used gtkorphan and a custom filter in Synaptic (Settings > Filters > New > Deselect All > Select 'Orphaned' > OK) to identify orphaned packages to remove. This went fine. I noticed some of the packages were identified as "transtitional packages", so I did a Name and Description search in Synaptic for "transitional". This found a number of packages, which I safely removed. It also found three installed packages (xkeyboard-config, xbase-clients and xutils) which cannot be removed without also removing ubuntu- desktop, nautilus, and many other packages. I chose not to do so. I've also reported bugs for the other two packages; the misleading description for xutils is: X Window System miscellaneous utility transitional package This package smooths upgrades from Ubuntu 5.04 ('Hoary') by ensuring that most miscellaneous utilities traditionally shipped with the sample implementation of X are installed. -- xutils should be removed https://launchpad.net/bugs/54740 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs