I've made some progress. Following suggestions from blogs/forums all over the place, I tried restoring from a stsadm backup. We'd been doing stsadm "directory" backups anyway, as I'd understood this was the best way to get absolutely everything backed up.
I thought I'd start clean, so I created a new web app Fraggle77 on port 9242 - http://fraggle:9242 in a new app pool fraggle77, content db = Fraggle_Fraggle77_Content. Did iisreset /noforce.
I then did a stsadm backup of FraggleNet -
stsadm -o backup -url http://Fraggle -filename D:\FraggleBackup\testbackup.bak (http://Fraggle equates to http://fragglenet) then the following restore
stsadm -o restore -url http://Fraggle:9242 -filename D:\FraggleBackup\testbackup.bak
That worked fine, however what we actually want is to restore from a previous "directory" stsadm backup, so I looked at the spbackup.log to find out which .bak file did the Content Database for the main FraggleNet & tried this restore -
stsadm -o restore -url http://Fraggle:9242 -filename D:\FraggleBackup\spbr0044\00000019.bak -overwrite
This gave me the following error
"Your backup is from a different version of Windows Sharepoint Services and cannot be restored to a server running the current version. The backup file should be restored to a server with version 1162887508.196608.17694860.0 or later"
This error would be expected if I was trying to migrate to a different server, but I'm not - the backup was done 2 nights ago on that same server. Highly unlikely that any updates done, but anyway I did a fresh directory backup -
Stsadm.exe -o backup -directory \\fraggle\fragglebackup -backupmethod full
then reinvestigated the spbackup.log to identify the .bak file & redid the restore
stsadm -o restore -url http://Fraggle:9242 -filename D:\FraggleBackup\spbr0045\0000001D.bak -overwrite
Still get the same WSS version error.
I am pretty baffled here, sorry the post is so long, but hope all the detail helps!
Regards, Jan