Hi Bob, thanks for that. Had to hit the hay around 4am so am back on the trail now.
So, the first suggestion didn't change anything, the second didn't get me into the manager, however, instead of getting the home page of the site I got this message:
"Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator,
[email protected] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."
I guess this just means the server was unable to redirect because of the changes. I have reverted the DB settings and .htaccess name.
I put a test index.html file in the manager folder just to check that the manager directory was functioning properly and it is, so I guess I need to look at the "chain of events" that are required to get the manager to work from it's index.php page, not that I know what that is yet or where it might be documented. OR, I have a backup of the DB from the pre-updated 2.1.5 version of the site, so I could re-install 2.1.5 and reload the DB... If neither of those works, I could rebuild the site from scratch. I have the css, js and flat file version of the site so could probably do it in a day, it's about 40 pages on 7 templates, in the end it may be the quickest way to solve the problem...
Again, many thanks for your help Bob, any futher ideas or insights would be welcome
Cheers - Mark