Status_203 - 10:04 pm on Nov 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

Ah, apparently it came down to the command I used to create the user - adduser vs useradd, can't remember which is which. One sets the shell to /bin/sh when I wanted /bin/bash ! One quick chsh later and all works

(It even fixed my inability to change the default umask. Presumably my non bash shell wasn't running my .bashrc file. All's good :) )