>>
> Your own predicament sounds worse than mine, so I won't criticize your choices 
> about admin privileges being shared by more than one person. Not an ideal 
> situation, 
I know. But timewise it made not much difference in this situation, and
it in fact the only computer I shared the admin rights. And yes ideal
wnt down the tubes in this case, the moment I broke my leg...
> 
> I was trying to help you avoid a total system reinstallation, but sometimes 
> that's the only way. 
I guess so. At least time wise in this situation.
The original idea was to keep it simple for my (old) mum and give her
KD3 "forever". Sadly in the early time, that didn't worked out with
trinity (not to be understood as a complain, it was just not ready at
that moment).
> 
> As I point out in my "quick & dirty" method, I avoid these problems by saving 
> the packages to an external drive, then use dpkg to install them when 
> necessary. 
In the beginning of KDE4 I thought I might use trinity myself, but went
more "spartan" some time ago by using fluxbox. And since I learned, that
this "special" user tends to forget things anyway, I use anydesk now to
solve problems, which are the same anyway and are NOT depending on which
DE is used, so maybe I just use software from the official repros to
avoid trouble like this.