It turns out my lack of networked media consumption utopia via xbmc was all down to upgrading my router... the xbox was fixed on 10.0.0.x while everything else moved over to 192.168.1.x ...so I learned that SMB doesn't like that at all.
Oh well, one task down... many more todo... maybe I can actually setup my kurobox in the next few days and then some really nice things might be possible.