I’m not crazy guys, I continue to update this because others might find it helpful. It’s kinda got under my skin now so I won’t sleep till it done and dusted. I’ve now moved everything to my local wamp setup - not easy when your dealing with old versions of PHP etc and gigs of data 
- But never the less the first stage of the import just tool a merge 5 mins and now I’m on to the design stage.
I’m sure the are more hard corners to hit my head on yet but it’s progress
keep posting, interested and will help others
JOHN
Well to get the update to run as fast as possible I not only moved it all to my local machine but also removed the images folder < to be honest this was an accident as I already had a copy of my site and forgot I had rename the images folder.
I don’t know what the update does with image but at the moment the new site works fine with just place-holders for the images. Need to work out the path for the images now as the old path seems not to work when I put the images back, well not the products any way. Perhaps I’m just confused
MMM… further on images - looks like I can’t connect the images after all. I could just export them from the live site I suspect but I feel to be confident I’ll need to get them in place on the local copy and then simply run the upgrade again. I’m in no real hurry so that’s what I’ll do. Report back later
Ok so I moved all the image back in and rerun the import. I would say eventhough it's long winded this method is certainly the way to go if you want to save time. This import took exactly 30 mins and now I just need to finalise the design and copy the data over to the live server (dev folder). I'm going to simply do a database export - import first. As I have all the data (image already on the server) I just need to put it in the right places.