I just wanted to end this thread. Thanks for the excellent help and advice.

From reading other forums and their postings I used apt-get to remove two conflicting packages and then
repeated the update / upgrade / install steps using apt-get

excellent installed well so that the Sid system is now running and updating with no conflicts or errors.

The sound issue is still wierd, but not critical. Knoppix hackers--please fix the sound stuff! The video drivers used to be this difficult and odd and now there is no problem at all. Perhaps in the next version of Knoppix sound can be konquered also.

Thanks again,
Cheers,
Freitag