WSL apt update broken on ARM Windows

[arpadav]

I was messing around with WSL in order to cross-compile something into x86, so I added amd64 into my dpkg architecture configuration to get some development headers. This worked fine, but now I am trying to run apt update and it gave me some errors on fetching amd64 packages. I then attempted to remove said packages and the architecture all-together and apt update seems to be broken, and I need some help reverting it.

apt-log.txt

My apt-update log is attached above. It keeps trying to fetch amd64 binaries from ports.ubuntu.com and other sources.

I have cleared my /etc/apt/source.list and reverted it to empty/default. I would expect this to then only fetch arm64 packages but still it keeps trying to fetch amd64

I then tried the following:

user@machine:/mnt/c/Users/user$ sudo dpkg --remove-architecture amd64
dpkg: error: cannot remove architecture 'amd64' currently in use by the database

Just to see what packages are being used:

user@machine:/mnt/c/Users/user$ dpkg -l | grep amd64
rc  libc6:amd64                     2.39-0ubuntu8.5                         amd64        GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ri  libgcc-s1:amd64                 14.2.0-4ubuntu2~24.04                   amd64        GCC support library

These are "marked as essential" on the machine, and I can't find anything online if they are actually essential to Windows Surface Pro or if they are artifacts of my previous installation? I assumed the latter, and tried to force removing them using:

user@machine:/mnt/c/Users/user$ sudo dpkg --remove --force-depends libgcc-s1:amd64 libc6:amd64
dpkg: error processing package libgcc-s1:amd64 (--remove):
 this is a protected package; it should not be removed
dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove libc6:amd64, only the config
 files of which are on the system; use --purge to remove them too
Errors were encountered while processing:
 libgcc-s1:amd64

But with no avail. I then tried to just do some other apt-isms to try to get it working including:

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
sudo apt clean
sudo apt update

But it is still failing... And with error-code 1 (FAILURE) so I literally am unable to update my lists and as a result, I can not apt install anything. I have no idea how to revert this and would like all the help I can get.

[arpadav]

If anyone runs into the same issue, the solution is dumb simple but unbelievable that there were so many hoops to jump through to get to this solution:

Edit /var/lib/dpkg/arch and remove amd64 and all will be solved