I tried rebooting and then got a message about libstl-ttf2.0-0 not being configured. Of course, libstl-ttf2.0-0 didn't show up in the package list, probably because I'd tried installing it before from disk and that probably failed for some other reason. At any rate, I went to xterm and did an apt-get install libstl-ttf2.0-0, which seems to have gone ahead and set up my python2.4-runtime. Sweet! Thanks Marius; don't abandon the barricades!
