So, I replaced the HD and reinstalled. The basic desktop now runs fine, except that the slim login screen doesn't work. So I ran smxi as noted; but dist-upgrade halts with an error 100. Repeated applications of option 1 (install -f) doesn't fix the problem, and fsck -a sda1 returns a message of"file clean". Does anyone have a suggestion? Thanks in advance.

PS: Looks like it might have to do with Libreoffice, although slim refuses to run at boot:

# apt-get -f install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libqt4-script libreoffice-core
The following packages will be upgraded:
libqt4-script libreoffice-core
2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 169 not upgraded.
131 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/28.7 MB of archives.
After this operation, 16.4 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
reading files list for package 'libc-bin': Input/output error
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
root@antiX1: