1. dselect (`man dselect` is your friend, or read the excellent article on using debian: http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue15/debian.html) is not the most user-friendly program around. It is normal that it reports a few errors as it operates in several rounds: in the first round, all packages that are required or used by other packages are unpacked and configured. Packages that rely on some of those are only unpacked, not yet configured as this will happen in the subsequent round. It is perfectly possible that the completion of this iterative process takes several rounds if many packages have to be installed/upgraded.
    If you are using a low-bandwidth connection (downloading the commonly selected packages for a new complete installation may easily take one hour given a 100 KB/sec-Internet connection), it may be advisable to copy the debian packages apt-get downloads to a safe place for later usage:
     mkdir -p /data/debian.packages;
     cp /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb /data/debian.packages 
    
    You may also wish to follow the procedure to set up a local mirror of these packages which can be used by dselect later on.