OK so a bit of positive news; I couldn't figure out what was going on, as the webserver was on a VM, I deleted it all and started again, this time with a pre-built 'stack' from a company called Bitnami; the installation failed from ZIP but this must be due to the PHP upload file limit; instead I simply loaded the zip file via ftp/scp and ran that way; it installed without error and when I clicked register; it worked first time returning me to the blank initial screen for multi-sites ... very stange but I am glad I am now able to get a move on with this!!!

Cheers for your suggestions, I'm still in the dark as to what could be the problem but at least now I can get on with work while investigating the failure in the background!

Regards

What you gave in your previous post seems confirm the hypothesis that you had a problem of ownership of the files and folders.

Perhaps that the new installation that you did give now a better consistency in the ownership of the files and folders.
Also the fact that you install from a directory also bypass the potential issue concerning the maximum upload size.

Check again your file and folder ownership that could leads you to other problems in the future.