Thinking this must be down to the kernel version, I downloaded and installed the 2.6.36 kernel from Ubuntu and installed it using gdeb on my wheezy install.
No, it don't make the touch screen work! Now, its true this is not the natty narwhal one, so that is maybe the thing to try next.
All this is in aid of getting a version of webconverger that will drive touch screens for this kiosk project. However, thinking laterally, or maybe simply desperately, what we are now coming to is just to put in Fedora 14, which does definitely work with touch screens, then lock it down to some extent using pessulus.
Not perfect, but given that life is short maybe this is the smart way to go. And yet, and yet, surely if all these other distros work out of the box, there must be some simple way to make debian work too.... Oh well.
Peter