Please stop using Sid, if you can. You should progress slowing from Stable, through Testing, to Unstable according to your level of experience and hardware requirements.
Good advice Robert. For the time being, though, I think I will stick to Sid, at least until I recover from the recent major troubles it gave me (through my inexperience, of course).
Thank you for your suggestions (CD burner, jigdo, GNU/Linux Bible), I'm sure they will come in handy sooner than I think. I have good news; managed to get my ppp connection going (an older slmodem tarball compiled), finished Sid download and installation and am left now with some minor tuning to do (especially USB mouse and touchpad recognition). It was quite a fight for my personal resources, but worth it to say the least.
Thanks again for the encouragement. All the best,Manuele