Beautiful! Thanks, that did the trick. I suspected systemd-shim, because I never understood what it was for in the first place. I've been on systemd init system for years now and when I see some systemd 'helper' to ease conversions from sysvinit I am always suspicious. Then when I saw the pre(post)inst files with 'mv' in there and the diff on the systemd and systemd-shim .conf files, the differences were _exactly_ the ones having to do with this problem (ListUnits{}, etc.). Shady shim!
Only remaining mystery is why it works on the other machine which has systemd-shim installed but I'll leave that alone, it's enough dbus stuff for me for the next few months :). OK to close. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org