I installed the Nvidia drivers and it went away -- don't see what the connection is. After trying to fix endless error messages warning me that the installers from Nvidia are incompatible and that I should use the Debian nividia-installer, I now have no GUI at all. Apparently the xserver is not intelligent enough to grab the ONLY screen available at bootup -- you have to give it a properly structured .conf file for it to know that you'd actually want to, you know, show stuff on a screen.

I use LXDE as my GUI. Clean, simple, with a menu system similar to what you used to have on the main commercial pc operating system.

without even scrollback capability, I can't figure out what they are.

When I build a new system, I typically install base with net-install and build from there. Too many conflicting programs if you do everything at once. At least that has been my experience.

Both of my Jesse systems were dist-upgrade from Wheezy and probably dist-upgrades from Lenny before that. They have been around a while. Could it be partitioning? The only time I have seen errors is when partitions get full. Since I partitioned for older distro (and made them tight to save space) I have run into this.

check this out.

http://www.tecmint.com/how-to-check-disk-space-in-linux/

if you don't install Nvidia drivers the way Debian expects, the result is undending woe. After I finish the running jobs, I'm going to nuke the partition and replace Debian with something else.