The force overwrite did the tirick. Could the force overwrite option be used with the package_name to accomplish the same thing ? If I RTFM it seems you could, but in addition to the files that cause problems one could get rid of configuration files that are better off left alone (imagine CUPS). I guess the lessons learned is 1} Use thes-s option when apt-getting to check for dependency problems and 2} that doesn't always catch everything.

Anyway thanks again.