thats good to hear as that gives me more things to try out.
It turns out that, as far as treating tbp as a mod (which I probobly won't do again), there is something I must have broke as fs:scp wont work now either.
After a glance around this forum (rather another more wakefull glance) I noticed a possibility that the updator may have malfunctioned leaving me without key files, looked and sure enough the core file was absent.
Made absolutely certain I had enough space on both system (there was enough before) and the destination drives (iffy before) and reinstalled core and core update, core files were present and the game ran... and oooh so pretty...
Also, strangely, tbp is the first game/mod that works with directx both freespace 2 and freespace 1 mod only work for me with opengl.