Thanks for the offer.
I actually have now succeeded thanks to a very helpful person at NTL.
It turned out that I have a non-working Ethernet , probably due to the driver. on trying USB all is well. I guess that when I tried USB some weeks ago the NTL registration site was down so I assumend that both routes were equally unusable. Anyway, I now have to update my drivers and try switching to Ethernet in due course.
Thanks again for the offer, I may yet need some help!