> Pleased to help, since Debian is my OS of choice and TDE my DE of choice.
Good combination, looks like mine :-) (even though I am on D/testing and TDE/git sources)

> hal-trinity libqt3-mt were marked as "automatically installed and are no
> longer required" Can someone please confirm they can be safely purged?
On v14.0.0 they are no longer required. Actually on Debian/testing hal is no longer provided at all for Linux (only for *bsd).
qt3 has also been replaced by tqt3.

> Someone else did mention what I forgot: do a backup before any major upgrade
Always a good point.

Cheers
  Michele