Dear diary...
Yep, it's me again. Today I installed a completely fresh copy of Windows 7 on my iMac. I carefully patched and updated the OS fully before installing Java and a few other things and then proceeded to get the latest launcher from the Linktart server.
Extracting the files to the default folder on the desktop I found that the minecraftftp.exe does absolutely nothing and running \Desktop\LinkTartLauncher_v3.2\LinkTartLauncher_v3.2\mcp_data\launcher allows me to log into MC (choosing not to update) but then sits on the "Updating Minecraft" screen with the message "Done loading" and the progress bar at about 95%.
It does nothing else.
Any help really, really appreciated...