I'm the OP so I thought I would follow-up.
It turned out that there were problems with some files in the Debian archives. The traffic on the resolution
There were also recently discovered problems in the jigdo tools (just fixed a week or so before), but it
The actual point of using this ancient release, which I hadn't mentioned, was to get a salt-minion installed and configured into
an existing salt complex and begin rectification. After an additional 3 days wrestling with the Debian and Saltstack repositories
and dealing with apt-get package resolution difficulties, I managed to complete that on one server and it's in the complex. My
work-around is totally brain-dead, but it circumvents the resolution issues with apt-get. It's possible that using apt, aptitude or
synaptic would have worked better, but I don't have time to find-out yet (or perhaps an apt-get problem; I can't really touch
fundamental software on these servers yet, most are production).
Many, many thanks to Thomas Schmitt and Phil Hands for their help on this. A whole company's thanks actually.
Now: In case anyone wonders, this is exactly how linux destroyed the old unix vendors and microsloth in the data-center.
I get better support here for free than I ever got from them for thousands. Once it was noodled-out, it was fixed in
under 24 hours. Carry on :-)