...a full OS re-install on something less than 2 months old seems drastic! will look at the Java situation.

Sometimes, you just have to bite the bullet.

Keep your fingers crossed.....I may have solved the problem! Having determined that all browsers were affected I deduced it was not the browsers. It had to be something common to them all. I did RAM tests, disc tests....anything I could think of. At the final stage I uninstalled IE8 and reverted back to 7. Updated back to 8 with no changes seen to the problem Eventually IE stopped working at all and just 'froze' on the initialising/connecting display.

I thought of the Network Interface/Ethernet card. The one in use was one that was part of the Motherboard so I sent for a new £10 NIC which gives up to 1000 megs speed........fitted 8 hours ago and everything seems wonderful......a great deal faster and no sign of the problem which used to occur after about 2 hours of heavy 'use' on the Net.....also IE8 started to work again without me having to do anything....

If you don't hear from me on this, then it fixed it!

Don't know. Probably the NIC card change caused the "reliable and known" to expire same as MS will require revalidation when enough hardware is swapped.

I do wonder if more of the reported problems stem from poor NIC card states. I certainly know that the software for these cards interweaves with other parts including audio drivers (REALTEK ?).

Well, I've seen series of 8 to 15 inconclusives. Probably you received the tasks, made the hardware change and returned them. Else logically, the init quorum would have been 2, which is the condition that identifies a PV on the first returned result in a quorum.