I tried reloading everything I had before and I am pretty much up to speed now. I did not have a problem with reboots this time. It may be I ran out of space and the upgraded operating system is less forgiving when you are not so careful. The biggest program I added was cadabra which uses about 400mb and upgrades some of the texlive programs. vic in itself is not a huge program so I'm not sure what happened. Perhaps files were already corrupted from a previous download. Gathering from the other threads, there may be some systemic problems using apt-get with PR1.3, but, In my case it was important to monitor free space and to heed rebhana's words to constantly do an apt-get clean!