Comment 7 for bug 759262

Thanks for this bugreport! Newer versions of synaptic set the "do not install recommends" options systemwide, that may explain why you see this behavior. update-manager will honor this setting.

I will change update-manager so that it will still install (new) recommends for desktop upgrades as we just use it in too many places on the desktop.

For your system you can run "sudo apt-get install --fix-policy --install-recommends" to see what is missing and fix it.