No same site structure and URL.
And yes you would not think that! I have never seen the theme designer's approach before.
Apparently the problem is caused by a completely unrelated issue, where the host provider has changed PHP versions from 5.3 to 5.5, and now I apparently am expected to fix the incompatibles :(
I suspect its near pointless trying to get that kind of help on here givin it could be a big task not really in the realm of WordPress, so thank you so much for your help Catacaustic I really appreciate it.