Upgrading from Lucid to Precise trashes my system

Attempting to upgrade my system from Lucid to Precise using the update-manager resulted in dozens of dependency errors - details below - , and eventually a dead system. The installer reported "processing was halted because there were too many errors", yet continued pretending to be cleaning up and asked to reboot. After reboot only a black screen resulted. The 'upgraded' computer could not be accessed by ssh, and was not even seen on the network. Rebooting into grub showed only the old Lucid kernels, and even selecting the repair entries only resulted in a black screen, still nothing on the network.

Here the error messages in sequence as reported. dplu is message 'dependency problem - leaving unconfigured', other messages are spelled out:

libsmb -- dplu
compiz-core -- dplu
libcompizconfig0 -- dplu
libxt6 -- dplu
libaudio2 -- dplu
libqtgui4 -- dplu
libphonon4 -- dplu
libqt4-opengl -- dplu
phonon-backend-gstreamer -- dplu
libqt4-declarative -- dplu
adduser -- dplu
fuse -- dplu
/var/cache/apt/archives/ntfs-3g_1%3a2012.1.15AR.1-ubuntu1.2_i386.deb -- 'pre-dependency problem - not installing ntts-3g'
e2fsprogs -- dplu
/var/cache/apt/archives/hostname_3.06ubuntu1_i386.deb -- 'pre-dependency problem - not installing hostname'
'package hostname is already installed and configured'
/var/cache/apt/archives/resolvconf_1.63ubuntu16_all.deb -- 'pre-dependency problem - not installing resolvconf'
netbase -- dplu
dbus -- dplu
libgnomevfs2-0 -- dplu
libgnomeui-0 -- dplu
libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 -- dplu
libio-socket-ssl-perl -- dplu
liblwp-protocoll-https-perl -- dplu
libwww-perl -- dplu
libfinance -- dplu
gnucash -- dplu
dbus-x11 -- dplu
'processing was halted because there were too many errors'
'cleaning'
'requiring restart'

I had saved a partition image of lucid, so I am fully recovered and back to where I started. If there are any improvements on the upgrader I can try again. But this is surely the worst upgrade I've ever done.