[SLE] Synaptic errors

I have installed the latest versions of apt-0.5.4, its development file and synaptic. "Apt-get update" got all the information from the sources, but synaptic won't run. Trying to run it from the console, I get two error messages:- "error restoring raptoptions" and "can't find /etc/apt/preferences. No such file or directory". I have created a "preferences" text file in /etc/apt, and now get this error message in place of the second:- "Invalid record in the preferences file, no such package header". How do I get synaptic to run, please? There was no problem with an earlier version when I used it with SuSE8.0. Many thanks for any information Keith