I haven't rebuilt dmenu yet VO I will later tonight and let you know but relatively positive it will resolve it. I looked a little at the package in debian builds and the one on the suckless site and it looks like I will have to patch first to get it "debian ready" not sure if PackRat can confirm this.
PackRat I am resisting -- barely -- playing with the paths in dmenu. It really is a world changer for me. I don't know if I am a script kiddie but I do love my scripts

and most of the stuff I use daily is stuff I wrote or modded for my needs. I did write up something that will essentially zen a list of my scripts from a dmenu call and then give me a terminal and that is what got me started on this path as it is pretty obvious I can do all that without zenity from the actual dmenu itself with the script you posted earlier. There is just so much cool stuff being done with dmenu it's put a hop in my step.