Your initial tasksel failures were due to a broken mirror: Mar 12 17:37:39 in-target: Err http://download.mirror.ac.uk etch/main xserver-xorg-video-all 1:7.1.0-12 Mar 12 17:37:39 in-target: 404 Not Found
This also resulted in tasksel installing a subset of the desktop task that is enough to make it think the print server task is installed, but not think the whole desktop task is installed. I'm still at sea WRT the strange messages you saw when you ran tasksel by hand. Can you reproduce that, perhaps get me a typescript of everything by running the script command and reproducing it in there? -- see shy jo
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