Meteor won't start, npm shrinkwrap fails -

so i'm trying run a simple boilerplate app, start meteor

=> started proxy. => meteor 0.8.0.1 available. update project 'meteor update'. => started mongodb.      npm: updating npm dependencies -- async, xml2js... npm err! error: enoent, open '/users/whit/.meteor/tools/c2a0453c51/package.json' npm err! if need help, may report *entire* log, npm err! including npm , node versions, at: npm err!     <http://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues>  npm err! system darwin 13.1.0 npm err! command "/users/whit/.meteor/tools/c2a0453c51/bin/node" "/users/whit/.meteor/tools/c2a0453c51/bin/npm" "shrinkwrap" npm err! cwd /users/whit/programming/mrt2/meteor-bone/packages/npm/.npm/package-new-1767w7f npm err! node -v v0.10.25 npm err! npm -v 1.3.24 npm err! path /users/whit/.meteor/tools/c2a0453c51/package.json npm err! code enoent npm err! errno 34 npm err!  npm err! additional logging details can found in: npm err!     /users/whit/programming/mrt2/meteor-bone/packages/npm/.npm/package-new-1767w7f/npm-debug.log npm err! not ok code 0  => errors prevented startup:  while building package `npm`: error: couldn't run `npm shrinkwrap` 

creating new app , running meteor works fine, though, deleting contents of package.json after manually installing packages , running.

so what's going on? have version of npm meteor runs? (edit: after looking around appears meteor keeps own version of npm work with, red herring.)

thank time.