@MichaelCropper, thank you for the additional details. I followed everything up to mounting the CDrom. Instead I chose to follow the instructions here instead: https://gitlab.com/xen-project/xen-guest-agent/-/releases
BTW... removing the old package may leave some residual config files behind. It should be safe to add --purge to the apt remove command. If not, you may need to do it using dpkg later. I listed all the packages with residual config using:
sudo dpkg -l | grep "^rc" | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 2
...and once I was sure of doing so for all packages, I followed with:
sudo dpkg --purge $(COLUMNS=200 dpkg -l | grep "^rc" | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 2)
If there is a downside to using the gitlab package rather than the tools on the CDrom, I'm hoping someone will let me know!