Package: sysvinit Version: 2.57b-0 For reasons I won't go into I had to take my system down to runlevel 1 (which seemed to be fairly equivalent to single user mode). This worked fine, and gave me a root shell. Unfortunately it killed bdflush, and when I later hit ^D and told the system to come back up to runlevel 3 it didn't get restarted. I had to start it again manually. Ian.