lightdm.override set to manual but it doesn't override

I'm running ubuntu 12.04. I'm trying to override lightdm and boot to a console screen. This used to be so easy. I set

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"

in /etc/default/grub, then updated grub. But then, in order to deal with ubuntu's sound problems I follows the instructions in

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/So...otingProcedure

which ran a number of updates. Since doing this, I now an unable to avoid being booted into lightdm's gui screen. I read that this was a bug, and that the bug had been fixed, but my version of lightdm (1.2.1) is apparently the most recent one.

The official way to override lightdm is apparently to create a file /etc/init/lightdm.override with the word "manual", but this is simply ignored.

I've tried a couple more things,
       adding a line "manual" to the bottom of lightdm.conf
       commenting out the stanza beginning with "start on"

The .conf script says that it's checking the command line for the word "text";
my proc/cmdline indeed has the word text at the end, but it's being ignored.

It really seems like the only explanation can be that /etc/init/lightdm.conf is not even being read by the startup script

So I tried to remove lightdm as some threads suggest with

sudo update-rc.d -f lightdm remove

This removed the link in /etc/init.d from lightdm to upstart-job

but *still* I get the lightdm gui

Could anybody suggest something please?
How could it possibly be so hard to do such a primitive thing as override a gui?e

Thanks for any advice!I