Possible progress!!
David's suggestion (offline) that my ISP may be the problem may be right on the money. Working back now, and as near as I can tell, my last successful connect was on my last day with Telecom (never thought I'd have a good word to say about them). I'm now with Vodafone and proxy issues may well be why I'm failing to connect.
So that suggests that Wibble's fix re setting up 127.0.0.1 in tclient.conf and adding in the emuproxy2 call into rc.sysinit.author is also bang on the money. The only problem here is that I appear to be missing emuproxy2!! Have searched the forum (and Google) in vain and closest I come is a link to emuproxyZA. So does anyone know where I can find emuproxy2?
Also possibly crucial is the lack of the postcode in the postcodes file as posted earlier. But have tried that fix on its own (ie without proxy changes) and still failing, so that's not sufficient.
David