After not upgrading for 4 months I finally got to it.
Using my favourite script for that, smxi, I ran into a major problem. Without doing anything it claimed a segmentation fault (short general statement no indication as to what the problem was) and stopped. Thinking it maybe a smxi problem I got out of it and ran apt-get dist-upgrade. There came the same error.
My sincere apologies for not getting exact coding (I am currently using the windows version of a dual boot and I was working at init 3 and have been busy trying to get things running).
I then proceeded to just apt-get install and checking on d-u to see if there were any changes.
After going through about 1200 of 1400 packages I hit on the bad guy. network-manager was the package. Forces a removal of sysvinit-core (not sure if critical or not, but can not find anything broken) installed it. Went back to apt-get dist-upgrade and all packages there were on the list for removel/new/upgrade got done.
If sysvinit-core is critical can someone please tell me. Thanks.