Jim, thanks for replying. In the event, the whole thing became so complicated that I elected to do a fresh install of Windows 7 - so many errors were being thrown up that I lost the will to live, having spent more than 20 hours working on this! I suspect it was all self-inflicted, trying to link AS2012 on my laptop to FSX on the pc. My Windows installation was only a few days old on my new setup, so not too big a deal once I'd bit the bullet. Just three days now to reinstall FSX...
Thanks again,
Rob.