Problems with syntax hightlighting after upgrading to vim 7 on Debian

I upgraded vim on my Debian box as part of the the general dist upgrade from Sarge to Etch. However, this resulted in all manner of problems with syntax highlighting.  The answer was to purge remove vim-runtime then reinstall vim. That appeared to reinstall the syntax files and everything appears to work as expected now.

sudo apt-get --purge remove vim-runtime
sudo apt-get install vim
sudo apt-get install vim-doc
sudo apt-get install vim-scripts