My grief!!, hundreds of updates, for Linux and fire fox out at once and all their supported bits and bobs triggered a 200Meg update via the update manager, most things squeaked and squawked at the sudden change , most frightenley VMWARE would not load, but top tip of the day, if a Linux app will not load, run it in terminal and it will normally make plain its grievance and tell you what to do to fix, this all my apps have done (phew!!) and we are back up and running, but time to make another ghost style image (curtasey of Part Image and the system rescue cd)