sudo dpkg --configure -a not resolving blocking of synaptic & updating

[m654321]

My guess is your old home partition is preserving kernel info for kernels that do not actually exist. Update grub will just keep adding them in. You'll need to use root to fix this which is risky, so this could be bad advice. Open a terminal and type sudo passwd root. Enter a new nix password twice and exit the terminal. Logout and reboot. Select other from lightdm login and type root, and enter the root password you set up. You will boot into root. You'll get an ioctl error which you can just ignore, x out the message, and root will load the xfce desktop. Clean out the kernel info from home there. To get rid of the root login afterwards open a terminal and type sudo passwd -dl root. Warning -- could be ugly. Don't go this route if you're not sure of what you're doing.

TC

Thanks TC & firnice03 for the advice.

Time's a bit short, so I went for the 'easier option' to reinstall LL3.2 (though not a total clean-install like last time) rather than faff around any more 'in the dark' doing things that might not work or just get me in piled-high-and-deep! With this reinstall, I preserved the '/home' instead of overwriting it as I wanted to keep as many of my settings as possible & not have to reinstall these.  And it's worked: thankfully the configuration files in '/home' didn't carry over the 'mess' into the new installation !  I just had to revisit "Install Updates", "Lite Software" & one or two things from "Synaptic".  I did have to reset my symlinks, though that only took around 5-10 minutes.  I had to reinstall Virtualbox, though all my VMs were automatically reloaded and links preserved to my DATA partition.

Thanks guys for your continued interest & offers of help - much appreciated

Mike

PS. @firenice03: I'd already tried advanced options but "the computer said no"  - it just got stuck at the kernel I selected