While upgrading my Ubuntu machine i needed to manually remove /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/dbus, but i accidently removed /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages instead. I was safe as i could ask dpkg which packages had files in those directories (with -S) and reinstall them. If someone else needs to do this, the command is: sudo apt-get --reinstall install `dpkg -S /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages | cut -d: -f1 | sed 's/,//g'` (changing the directory name, of course)