Help!!! adept nightmare

[D. R. Evans]

About two minutes after my last e-mail (in which I could neither
remove nor update vmware-player), I discovered that along with
everything else, my installation of vmware server was no longer
functional.

So I:

1. manually removed vmware server.
2 Rebooted. Hmmm... still some vmware network-related processes running.
3. remove vmware server again.
4. Reboot. vmware netwrk processes STILL running.
5. Manually kill the vmware processes.
6. Manually remove vmware server (for the third time).
7. tell apt to remove vmware-player. AH! For the first time I don't
get any error messages.
8. Open adept and serach on vmware packages.... hmmm... a bunch of
vmware-related are packages are still installed, but the main
vmware-player is, at last, gone.
9. using adept, uninstall all the packages that contain "vmware" in their name.
10. Reboot (probably unnecessary, but at this point who knows what
vestige of vmware might still be around to cause trouble by installing
network-remated process at reboot time"
11. Check that there are no vmare processes running -- there aren't.
12. Run adept-updater. Just like first thing this morning, the only
update listed is for kopete. Unlike this morning, it really does only
attempt to install the kopete update. No sign of vmware anywhere.
13. Yay! except that now I will have to reinstall vmware server from
scratch manually at some point. But that's such a pain that I'll leave
that for another day.

I hope that this doesn't happen to anyone else -- but at least if it
does we now know how to recover, although it is at the cost of losing
vmware server. (Actually, wish I had thought to try running vmware
server earlier; I knid of suspect that it was hosed from the moment
that adept updater started trying to install vmware-player.)

Thanks for the patience everyone. (Maybe at least I provided some mild
entertainment or thoughts of "I'm glad that's not happening to me" :-)
)