Here we are a month later, but a fair bit of water has passed under the bridge ... A spot of leave, higher priority stuff (read "the list on the fridge"
, visiting family, etc, etc ....)
And a format and reinstall of XP. I tried to use the recovery disc thoughtfully provided by Medion, but I had fiddled with partition sizes with Partition Magic and that killed Medion's recovery system ...
I got to the parlous state of a reinstall due to overuse of XP's system restore. Over the weeks I ended up completely filling the C drive with System Restore data - wasn't aware of it until the machine ground to a halt.
The forced clean start has worked a treat - all is now well and getting the wireless network and ICS up and running on a fresh OS was a breeze. Sadly, I do not know what went wrong earlier on - only the deceased installation of XP knows that.
You Mac users may justifiably smirk.
AA