done some more work on this and managed to dig a bit deeper. basically I removed all carman related packages, and restarted. I then tried an install using apt-get, and configuration of the carmand package fails with the following error...

starting carmand message bus: invoke-rc.d: initscript carmand, action "start" failed

rebooting and then attempting a package configuration using dpkg --configure carmand still fails.

any ideas anybody??