Well it seems on the third attempt mother has managed to speak to someone who agrees that there is a problem with the connection. Especially since they checked the account and noticed the PC managed to log onto the network for all of 2-3 seconds last night
We now have an engineer visiting tomorrow which is a minor miracle in itself as usually you would be waiting till the Monday to get a visit.
We'll let you know how it goes when we find out but I'm hoping that this just proves that there are more people like Debs, MB etc in NTL support roles and if you are lucky you will get to speak to them too
BTW thanks to the help from MB in this thread and to Debs for making herself available and offering to call my parents at home to get it sorted out if todays call hadn't worked. Next time we're all out at a meet we owe you a drink