went back yesterday, the vista machine was running really slow at this stage, dropped the auto negotiate on the ethernet card to 10mb full and it was fast as on internal and external traffic, tried same fix on windows7 machine and still no connection.
Bought cable tester and got errors at both ends, re punched wall socket then just got error at far end. Looked at the RJ45 connector to see that pin5 and 6 were the wrong way round (dear husband had done this), re did rj45 connect tested and all fine. Windows 7 machine now a happy bunny.