Thanks for your encouragement. I got Wicd to work, finally, but no tray
icon. Maybe a reboot will fix that.
After doing a web search I decided that what I had to do was remove all wicd
entries in rc2.d and init.d folders - with my heart in my mouth because I
didn't really know what I was doing. That allowed me to use apt-get remove
wicd, which told me to apt-get autoremove and that did remove wicd finally.
I tried to install the old and new versions, which I had downloaded and had
on the desktop, but gdebi told me in both cases to use the version in the
repositories. That installed wicd_1.5.3 successfully.

Everything works now except there is no tray icon. I know I had it before.
I've searched the menus and can't find any referrence to showing it. Any
ideas?