okay two things:
1 the only way to get my web shield and mail shield working fine again was to do an install from scratch (it worked)
2 following the install I rebooted and left the computer for about 15 minutes, when I came back and attempted to login ... when that wasn't possible, something (?) timed out and the system was stuck on the windows spinning animation. Forced a shut down, booted and everything's still fine.