Hi and thanks The Mad Hatter & PodMaster,

I didn't think a recompile would be all that difficult, I just got my knickers in a twist and 'lost the plot' for a while there. Thank you very much both for your prompt replies. Using your advice I'm going off to get the source code and install from tarballs rather than .deb packages... hopefully that'll do the trick, and again thanks for the words of encouragement - most appreciated.

barrd - the somewhat more relieved

Oh, and PodMaster I 'believe' the threading issue is more to do with the RedHat distro and some "locking" issues - I couldn't make head nor tail of it, but yes, it does seem a tad suspicious.