I am on Debian Lenny but have added sid to sources.list recently. I have never marked all upgrades.
Helping with son's homework, I tried to install a java runtime plugin- this was required for http://www.mste.uiuc.edu/users/carve...s/default.html. Unusually for Debian, iceweasel crashed, and I started to get disk full errors. Other applications locked, and after logout I couldn't get back in via kde. I have been adding applications lately and had neglected to apt-get-autoremove, so I did so now. I logged back into kde, and noticed
-some applications gone, eg abiword, kaudiocreator
-applications built from source recently eg LAME are intact
-odd evolution errors: "unable to sync" and most of my inbox messages doubled.
-partition was nearly full. This had been eased by autoremove and is now completely sorted.
-appearance of desktop looks updated.

I am assuming that I caused a problem by trying to write new software onto a full partition. I think it unlikely that the website I was using, or the java applet I was compiling, was responsible. I feel that autoremove did more than I expected it to!

But I'm not grumbling. 5 mins to fix this on Linux. Imagine what it would have been like on windows!

I'd be interested to share views on this.