arnesp,
Thanks for that info, very helpful.
But, as always, I spoke too soon - I have more problems on this reinstalled system!!!!
I suspect - am I'm hoping that for some reason (Dolphin crashing when I open or do things in MCC, some other weirdness - none of my External drives are being recognised as being plugged in; etc.) what is causing this is that I kept my existing /home drive with the data from the previous system on it. I don't know why that would happen - but that's the only difference besides a new, clean /var partition.
So, I'm going to have to reinstall yet again and use a new /home drive as well as a /var. also, what I thought was a spare partition next to /var isn't identified in the pgm in windows, but it's the Linux Swap partition.
Before I reinstall I will delete the current Swap partition and allocate a new one on another drive. Then I can expand the /var partition to alleviate the space problems which can occur with the folder I use that is located on there (and will grow in small amounts gradually).
I'll let you know how that endeavour goes, but it won't be till after tomorrow.