thanking Mike Bird for his advice!

I am still stuck. I mentioned I had another partition set up with an 
old Kubuntu or something. I refurbished it and updated it to Buster, 
no problems.

it would be nice however to reclaim my old space.

I'm wondering about the idea (a variant of something Mike suggested) 
of doing some kind of install or re-install of the base system. 
hopefully leaving most of the configuration files of installed 
programs intact.

what's a clever way of doing this? not sure how to get a listing of 
these things.

or simpler: reinstall tdelibs in order to reinstall tdeinit?

f.

-- 
Felmon Davis