Hi Aus9,
I took your advice and had another go at installing virtualbox. I dug through my "goody box" and found a 3.0Ghz dual core Pentium 4 processor so I swapped that with the Celeron in my PC. I also have a spare CF Card so I can't blow away all the work we've done so far.
I downloaded virtualbox-ose and manually loaded it as you suggest. It gets past the qtxxx loads and goes black screen at what appears to be loading a graphics program /library / whatever; but I cannot see a familiar looking name in the files list. It all happens so fast its almost impossible to see the file name.
Is there a single step load process that I can use to determine the culprit.