Right, not giving up and having funny dreams all night, I traced my steps and then remembered that after transferring some files to the installtion from a USB disk I wanted to format the USB drive. As I am so lazy I was looking for a program which will do this for me (rather than typing a very short sentence.... ) and found Kmformat. No, never heard of it before.... so I installed and as I could not find an entry in the KMenu, I tried to launch it from the shell - $kmformat /dev/sda to see what would happen. As you probably spotted (good children...) sda is not exactly the right dev to call when you are using SCSI laptop HDD. It should have been be sdb! But in my defence the shell did return a 'command not found'. My only quam with Kubuntu is that if the partition table got corrupted during my work I should have known about it, right? If not, when the hell could this have ahppened?
I am not giving up and tonight Kubuntu WILL be installed and IT WILL WORK!!!

Thanks guys, I do feel a bit better....I thought it was a very articulated rant!