Having finally cleared my apt-get problems using dpkg to remove the offender, I did an upgrade. System was trashed as the modules.def file was gone. The extra directory was killed somehow. As luck would have it, there was another copy of this file around so after getting rid of 'extra' and mdir a new extra and copying the modules.def, up and running once more. Please, gurus as Debian, check why this might have occured. Any, alls well that ends well. very well.