Thanks for the info. I tried installing ms tt core fonts and it failed, had tried abiword and it did the blank screen thing, so I removed it and will do the Squeeze workaround later, but in the meantime I've got all these packages apt-get keeps telling me autoremove can take care of. Was thinking I might just blow the image away since all I really care about are OO, Gnumeric and R (which works like an absolute dream, let me tell you!). These last two installed perfectly, so I'm done experimenting.