<snip>
I find, as of last night, that I am prevented from using IMCE as >
administrator. > I get error message that Page cannot be viewed, You do not have > permissions, etc. > What a load of rubbish, if you pardon my expression, Admin not having > correct perms seems very strange.
</snip> OK Now the site is working. the PHP.ini is working and I found the cause of the IMCE error to be a switch which sets image directory to public or private, if set to private IMCE fails. So far so good. I can access and use the Drupal system. Thank you to all who helped.