Assembled Wisdom! The first and most important problem is: my iceweasel crashes instantaneously upon being invoked, whether from the Activities list on the LH side or from the command line. It was totally reliable under wheezy.
Second: my mutt, invoked from the terminal/command line. crashes instantaneously also. Before I resigned myself to the gnome environment, it ran fine. Three: where is the utility file ? I used this all the time in previous Debian installations. Any help/suggestions much appreciated! Alan