I went right back to the beginning and followed through the instructions from the link. Got to the installing the kernel and it did load this time, did the check requested in the article and saw it was the correct kernel running
installed the amd64 dpkg, apt etc as told
then troubles started again could not get apt to run properly
By now I thought this is a nonsense, over the years no end of crud has built up, and I have cocked something up. So decided to do what I should have done before, downloaded backups of data, db files. and conf files and did a complete reinstall of the OS. Which I might add was quicker in the end
Have installed, loaded all the necessary software, set up the firewall again and am now in the process of reloading websites, databases and Bind9 files.
The problems before were obviously where I had cocked something up and I could spend days hunting through. Now I have a nice clean installation, tons of rubbish deleted and I can manage the various bind zones and apache website files in a more orderly fashion.
Sorry to have been a nuisance
Keith