"not an ELF file" error - Kicker / panel not working

I was recently upgrading (apt-get upgrade) Mepis 6.0rc, about a week ago, and things are generally working well, other thank Kicker, which does not run at all. KDE starts, but no panel. This particular upgrade included going from KDE 3.5.2 to 3.5.3, all from the Mepis/Ubuntu pools (i.e., I haven't done anything fancy to my /etc/apt/sources.list).

I tried reinstalling kicker, and after the message "setting up kicker" I got the following:

ldconfig:/usr/lib/libkdeinit_kwin_rules_dialog.so is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start

Tried reinstalling Kicker again after release of 6.0 final; same problem.

Any suggestions or ideas about what is going on here?

-- B