You wouldn’t beleive it Norm, exploring the IDE a bit more led me to try erasing the flash memory, which produced a message in the Debug Console saying that it couldn’t connect to the esp-prog. I decided to change the COM entry to an RS-232 HS one - knowing that I had it working that way previously, and voila, it worked!
What can I say? Accept to ackowledge the ability of monkeys to write novels, and that I’m hoping that eventually I’ll be able to call upon lots of scenarios that work - even if for only a while.
Thanks for the offer, and maybe it will be taken up at some point, but for now I’m OK and actually making progress with the code. Today for instance, the debugging array is behaving and so not putting entries into the wrong place - but without having changed anything - except the port settings. I’m now moving on in the code.
Many thanks for now 