Red carpet problem (debian woody)

[Johan Vervloet <johan vervloet ua ac be>]

I've installed red carpet 0.9 on my Debian woody system.  When I start
the program as root, I get this message :

Red Carpet has encountered an error while trying to process your
request:

Unable to access packaging subsystem:
Couldn't parse /var/lib/dpkg/status: The /var/lib/dpkg/status file is
malformed or contains errors

When I try to open the Preferences dialog box, it crashes, and this
appears on the stderr :

Gtk-WARNING **: invalid cast from (NULL) pointer to `GnomeDialog'

GnomeUI-CRITICAL **: file gnome-dialog.c: line 801
(gnome_dialog_close_hides): assertion `dialog != NULL' failed.

Gtk-WARNING **: invalid cast from (NULL) pointer to `GnomeDialog'

GnomeUI-CRITICAL **: file gnome-dialog.c: line 382
(gnome_dialog_set_parent): assertion `dialog != NULL' failed.

Gtk-CRITICAL **: file gtkwidget.c: line 1424 (gtk_widget_show):
assertion `widget != NULL' failed.


I can start red-carpet as `ordinary user' without any troubles, but then
I can't install packages.

Any hints ?

Kind regards,
Johan