Thanks for the input Phil but that didn't work for me. I tried a clean backup recovery and went through the same process to install. When shared-mime-info failed, I edited shared-mime-info.postinst and added the exit 0 to the end of the file. I still get the same error and I end up with a number of failed files. The main problem tracks back to gconf2 which needs shared-mime-info.
I am going to play around with this some more tomorrow but atm I am still stalled. Thanks again, Tony
