Comment 8 for bug 447197

On second thought simply duplicating the logic of procps start is a better idea as a workaround, namely:
cat /etc/sysctl.d/*.conf /etc/sysctl.conf | sysctl -p -

When procps is fixed (either to support restart or start), there are a few other things that need to be updated as well:
/etc/sysctl.d/README needs to point to the new method (probably just start procps) rather than suggesting invoke-rc.d
DEBHELPER needs to do the same thing
The Wine package needs to be converted back into using the new method rather than its workaround