Thanks to all for your advice, and thanks particularly to gutmensch for updating libvpx and to TaoTePuh for clarifying the source of the dependency.
Unfortunately the updated libvpx did not resolve the problem. I continue to get the same error on the computer with 256mb ram. I tried TC3.0, prompted by comment from TaoTePuh, but got the same error message. I moved my testing (ultimately intend to use a new mini-itx as a music player feeding a USB DAC) to a computer with 512mb ram. I do not get this error any longer, but I still have not succedded in starting mpd.
I did an iso boot of TC3.1, downloaded & loaded alsa followed by mpd, created directories and modified /etc/mpd.conf to point to directories and to specify port and user tc (that is all I edited). I receive the error message:
log: problem opening log file "/home/tc/.mpd/log" (config line 37) for writing
Aborted
I figured perhaps permissions were a problem so I chaned to rwx for all (0777), but that did not fix the problem. I then commented the log line in /etc/mpd.conf (accepting default logging in syslog), but I got the following error message:
Failed to load database: Unexpected end of file
database: db file "/home/tc/.mpd/database" is not a regular file
I then tried creating the files in /tmp and modified /etc/mpd.conf accordingly. The same error messages persisted.
Any advice? (I believe the first time I used the 512mb computer I did not get these errors, but when I returned to this the next day, these errors came up. I checked for updated extensions in that interval. I believe the only relevant one is ncurses, but I do not know if that is related to these errors??)
Thank you