[Hampshire] respawning apt process

I have an apt process that keeps respawning and I can't kill it, I launched an
apt command from the cli, it came back with an error (something about cache
being to small), I went off to look for some further information and noticed
that my cpu was being hammered, looking at running processes with htop, I can
see apt-get -s upgrade is running but everytime it appears it has a different
pid

How can I kill it?

I am running a Debian Lenny based system

Tim