I've kind of tried the opposite

My sources.list file contained one entry to sarge and one to stable. Since etch is now stable I think that is what caused the initial problem.

I have changed both to be sarge, done an "update" and a few "upgrades". I now have what looks like a clean apt database again.

Something odd has happened with php/apache, looks like I am stuck without the php module enabled, but I expect I can fix that.

After reading the many pages of stuff I need to do for a clean sarge-etch upgrade it can wait for now.

Thanks