roland
Thanks for these responses.
Not knowing what I was looking for with the 3rd party repositery suggestion, I left that for now.
I tried the dkpg-reconfigure suggestion but failed to get correct syntax, again lack of knowledge always holds me back.
Finally I tried the suggested package reinstall, it ran to completion but the following dist-upodate produced the broken package warning.
the install seems perfectly satisfactory and this condition causes no problems I am aware of, can I disregard it?