Thanks, Harry. Sorry that I garbled that post a bit, having stuck the path to the Kaffeine init files into the wrong place.

I guess I just naiively assumed that if Synaptic is provided, it would be safe to use it to do some upgrades. Maybe there's a warning somewhere that I missed?

I'm also looking forward to hearing why I wasn't able to free space by moving files. I do have a desktop system running vanilla Debian, but I'm in a situation where I'm going to have to rely on the laptop for a while, so I'm trying to cobble together a working system that gives me most of what I want for the time period when I'll have to use the laptop.

The internal drive has 250GB. If I can figure out how to safely repartition that space under Windoze7, I might be able to do an install of Debian itself. But in the near term, I won't have time for such activities. I think, however, I may get a larger USB flash drive and do a new install. It shouldn't be difficult to bring over what files I've created and system files I've modified from the other stick.

Thanks again!