Hi thanks for the reply. Yeah i did try without the compatibility pack, but there were a number of links that didn;t work, i couldn’t get the sidebar to show, and there was more work to do with styling.
so now its just the second issue. I’ve deactivating all plugins and reverting to a standard wordpress theme, but no joy. I see someone had a similar issue, but it was never followed up. https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5320