My setups tools system appears to be broken beyond recovery. And no doubt my attempts at recovering it have made it worse.
Now I'm looking for the "nuke the site from orbit" option.
I've already done a "Complete Removal" of python-setuptools in Synaptic
Here's where I am currently at:
$ easy_install
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/bin/easy_install", line 9, in <module>
load_entry_point('distribute==0.6.10', 'console_scripts', 'easy_install')()
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 299, in load_entry_point
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 2229, in load_entry_point
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 1948, in load
ImportError: No module named setuptools.command.easy_install
$ ls /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/
distribute-0.6.8-py2.6.egg nose-0.11.2-py2.6.egg nose-0.11.4-py2.6.egg setuptools.pth
easy-install.pth nose-0.11.3-py2.6.egg setuptools-0.6c9-py2.6.egg-info