Well, I fell back to 42.3 as previously stated and it made no difference.   
   At that point I decided I'd played around long enough with this stuff.   
   - cleared Cache on my desktop system   
   - backed /home up   
   - nuked the /home directory on the laptop   
   - loaded it from the backup   
   - deleted subdirectories I don't need on the laptop.   
      
   It would have been better to have done the reload at runlevel zero but I don't   
   know how that works nowadays.  All is now fine.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)