Thanks, Estel. I found some quirks with wicd/network manager inter-dependencies last night during a pruning exercise: I kept pruning until I lost the network and had to install things back manually. I had to install wicd and dependencies, but synaptic was happy with network manager missing.

Unfortunately, I kept fiddling with it and synaptic froze on me to the point that I had to pull the battery out. Needless to say, my Debian image ended up FUBAR so I will have to start all over. I guess I will start with a barebone image this time.

BTW I started off with w3e and upgraded to pure Squeeze bus as I say, that's all history now.