Matt & Robin - thanks for the advice. I totally forgot to get back afterwards.
The fix was to change the camera from "PC Connection" to "Print/PTP". Vista picked it up straight away with the need to load ANY drivers. I connect to the machine and immediately Adobe LightRoom fires up and sucks the images down - no need for that horrible Canon software at all.
Vista really is superb in the way it handles the hardware abstraction layers. That's the Canon AND Nikons that I have taken care of - plug and play. No driver downloads, nuffin'.
