Hi all - Okay the random pixies solved it, after being left alone to sit in the cupboard the connection self healed itself. Which leads to me to believe the connection was never live to this morning contrary to vendor information a week ago.

Thanks for the ideas and if anyone is asking again the Spark/Netgear settings do appear to work quite nicely even after loading them a dozen times or more which they should have done.

Cheers for the comments and help and its good to know i wasn't going mad after all.