You're unable to install it? It seems that these days, you can't avoid
installing it (or something like it) - it just seems to get installed
as standard with just about everything - I didn't get the choice,
sadly ... mind you, I did take the easy route and installed from the
latest Live CD image ...

Is Synaptic different from the Add/Remove Programs option, then? As I
said, I can't seem to find it in there ...

I don't have a problem using the shell - despite being largely
unfamiliar with a lot of these newer, Unix variants, I "grew up" as a
sys-admin on SunOS/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX (been out of that for something
like 8 years now), so am familiar enough with Unix in itsself - if
there's a better route to removing it using this ('apt-remove <blah>',
or whatever it's called), then it would be great if someone had the
proper syntax that I could simply pull into a shell-script, or
somesuch.

I'll try to have a look at synaptic later tonight, when I get a chance
(currently working silly hours ...)