Are you running debian's package or did you pull bitcoin from git?

If it's debian's package then thats very alarming that they are shipping untested git snapshots.

If you are building it yourself,  type "git checkout v0.8.4rc2"  and build that.  I am _very_ interested in hearing from you about how things are working for you, as we believe there may be problems with a dependency in debian unstable, so please follow up.