ISSUE RESOLVED

 

Many thanks to all

The solution was provided by Jan

 

For info and for the sake of anyone else experiencing similar problems.

 

I did a dpkg -L <package>|less   for every apache package. It immediately showed some of the common files which should have been there weren't. So:

 

aptitude purge <each of the packages in turn>

 

This worked but gave a list of directories it could not remove as they were non-empty, so I manually removed each of these. Then did a aptitude install apache2

 

Lo and behold, it is now working.

 

Where I had gone wrong previously was that I had initially installed apache2 and so just did a aptitude purge apache2 not each individual package seperately.

 

I really do appreciate the time and effort given by others to help me with this problem

 

Keith