speech-dispatcher could not be installed when upgrading from Kubuntu 13.04 to 13.10

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This looks like an error with the speech-dispatcher package:

speech-dispatcher (0.7.1-6.1ubuntu3) wird eingerichtet ...^M
Neue Version der Konfigurationsdatei /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf wird installiert ...^M
chown: Zugriff auf »/var/run/speech-dispatcher“ nicht möglich: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden^M
dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von speech-dispatcher (--configure):^M
 Unterprozess installiertes post-installation-Skript gab den Fehlerwert 1 zurück^M
dpkg: Abhängigkeitsprobleme verhindern Konfiguration von jovie:^M
 jovie hängt ab von speech-dispatcher; aber:^M
  Paket speech-dispatcher ist noch nicht konfiguriert.^M

What I see in the speech-dispatcher.postinst script is the following:

USER_NAME=speech-dispatcher
HOME_DIR=/var/run/speech-dispatcher

if ! id -u $USER_NAME >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  adduser --quiet --system --ingroup audio \
          --home $HOME_DIR \
          --shell /bin/sh --disabled-login \
   --gecos 'Speech Dispatcher' $USER_NAME
  chown -R $USER_NAME $HOME_DIR

Can you tell me if you if you have a speech-dispatcher user in your /etc/passwd and what the home folder is? E.g. "grep speech-dispatcher /etc/passwd".

Yes, speech dispatcher-user is available. Here the correspoding line from my passwd:

speech-dispatcher:x:118:29:Speech Dispatcher,,,:/var/run/speech-dispatcher:/bin/sh

BUt: The directory "/var/run/speech-dispatcher/" does not exist on my system! I think this might be the problem....

Yes, I think that is a bug in the package, but it does not explain the failure during upgrade, as the failing code IIUC is only called after the call to adduser, which should create it at that time.

I think /var/run nowadays lives in /run which is cleaned on reboot (is /var/run a symlink to /run on your system?)

Yes, as you expected: /var/run is a symlink to /run on my installation.

and run, of course is a tmpfs, like stated in my /etc/mtab:
tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755 0 0