Right. At first I thought my problem was vlc from DMO:
# apt-cache policy phonon-backend-vlc
phonon-backend-vlc:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 1:0.8.0-dmo2
Version table:
1:0.8.0-dmo2 0
500 http://www.deb-multimedia.org/ sid/main amd64 Packages
0.8.0-1 0
500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
But that is not the real issue -- it is this:
root@imerabox:/# apt-cache policy libc6:i386
libc6:i386:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 2.19-10
Version table:
2.19-10 0
500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main i386 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
root@imerabox:/# apt-get install libc6:i386
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libc6 : Breaks: libc6:i386 (!= 2.19-11) but 2.19-10 is to be installed
libc6:i386 : Depends: libgcc1:i386 but it is not going to be installed
Breaks: libc6 (!= 2.19-10) but 2.19-11 is to be installed
libdom4j-java : Depends: libmsv-java but it is not going to be installed
libxft2 : Depends: libfontconfig1 (>= 2.11) but it is not going to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.
Which results from my need to use skype only on this one system, and skype needs libc6:i386, libasound2:i386, libgcc1:i386 and some other i386 libraries. Today I let apt-get rip out libasound2:i386 and skype for the purpose of investigating this issue, but if it doesn't get sorted by Sunday night, skype will have to go back on with apt-get -f install, and the more recent 64-bit packages will have to come back out. Such is life with skype.