This is exactly why I dislike sudo so much! If you look in the man-page for dpkg you'll find the options --clear-selections and --yet-to-unpack. I'd suggest to try these. Keep in mind to make a backup first:
Code:
dpkg --get-selections > selected.txt
and backup any data (and config files!) on that server. Finally, upgrade your server to Etch (the current stable). Perhaps you can get away with just issuing the apt-get dist-upgrade command. It might happen that apt goes looking for the latest packages w/o processing the packages from dselect. Keep in mind that in the upgrade a lot of packages are removed and newly installed...