Icarus
Yes tried that matey and it's the same end result. It stalls out, but only on the drive to which I've moved the Temporary Internet Files folder. It works OK on the Win XP drive
I'm thinking of creating a Temporary Internet Files folder on a 250mb zip drive disk and after copying the folder to it, removing that zip disk and preparing one with (only) all the cookies on (which I'd rather not lose).
In theory it should just be a matter of assigning the Temporary Internet Files folder to the zip-disk, removing that one and replacing it with the one prepared earlier. The index.dat will still include the pesky files but will be physically minus them hopefully. If it won't work with a zip drive I'll use a gash scsi hard disk to do the trick and massage it on another non-XP machine.. which should grant access.
It would appear to be yet another Microsoft bug (as assisted by Google).
Still open to easier solutions.