hello again
gave up and just whacked a fresh MLP image on my 500gb ext USB disk. backed up my game saves from the rom directory 1st! :-)
Wish I'd done it ages ago, as now everything works brilliantly! woohoo
I did manage to break it again after trying to put a kodi build on (wont be doing that again!) So now refreshed my build and everything hunky-dorey again! Just thought I'd let you guys know.