update problem broke my hoary today

[Mike Bate]

Haven't started Hoary for a day - started OK, then I let Synaptic do 
the updates it wanted - something didn't go right, and now when I 
reboot, login screen appears, I enter user and password, and a moment 
later a terminal window appears with the message "There was an error 
creating the child process for this terminal". Clicking OK removes the 
error message, leaving the terminal, but no prompt.

Now Ctrl-Alt-F1 for a real terminal, log in OK. No network is 
available (eth0 or ath0, depending on which card is plugged into the 
PCMCIA slot).

Same symptoms when recovery mode boot option is used.

Shown on the screen is
* PCMCIA not present
* Starting Postfix Mail Transport Agent... [ ok ]
then several occurances of
Usage: modprobe [-v] etc (this is probably a clue),
a few other normal looking commands, then the login:

Help...!

-- 
Mike
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