OK. I shot myself in the foot with this one... I'll admit it up front.
I did the upgrade from Dapper to Edgy. It went better than most. Suffice it to say I got the GUI back as well as a number of other things which messed up. While tracking down one problem (something wasn't finding files for verification I burned onto a DVD - source or copy I don't know) I figured the problem might have been a library (libdvdread1). I thought I'd uninstall and reinstall. The problem is it took out mplayer. Again I figured an uninstall and reinstall may do the trick. Well now I can't reinstall it or vlc because both depend on this library and the library is unavailable.
Figured I'd try compiling it myself but Ubuntu complains about no acceptable C compiler in the path.
Later Mike