Well after 2hrs of being on the phone to a MS Vista expert I'm back up and running . Somehow the activation process became corrupt (whilst trying to get the OCZ to run at decent speeds). So after lots of 'slmgr' commands that failed a safe mode and restore done the trick so I now have a new product key and can get back into Windows.

Still not used the system in anger yet - waiting for new memory to arrive - but some strange things :-
1) Everest now reports hard disc temps and M/B temp but no N/B temp.
2) The sata connections report the correct drives in the bios (Samsung port 1, Hitachi at 3 & 4, Optical 5 & 6) but in Windows using disc management or Acronis Disk Director it sees them in a different order - Samsung boot disc is disk 2 with Hitachi at 1 & 3.

Might not be strange but just unique to Intel chipset as I have always had Nvidia chipsets in the past.

to this thread Revhead and Stealth.