cool. glad you guys are having some success with it now. I figured out why the good .conf file wasn't being copied, I guess there was 2 .conf files in my source tree and one of them is useless, which just sits there and tempts me to update it... and of course just gets lost when i build.
i didn't bother updating the .deb though since it's simple enough to manually copy, and i'm more worried about fixing the debian/control so the main program installs reliably without the command line.