thanks. didn't think just rooting would cause such a problem. the minor update before worked fine. Spent most of last night after work waiting for stuff to download, for it not to work lol. Left a gingerbread rom downloading overnight, so will try that after work today. The big problem is I can't use odin and adb doesn't seem to work either. probably my 10 year laptop's fault, but I can't check. What I can use is the stock recovery (e3) thingy, but so far I can't get it to go past checking whether a rom is signed. I'm hoping this gingerbread is. it says it's the official stock one, but then I thought that ics one was too.
Does anyone know if I'm just being completely stupid (likely) and totally baarking up the wrong tree here, could I be doing something much simpler?

If I could even just get my data, pictures, videos and stuff, copied across then I'd happily just send it off to Samsung, but there doesn't seem to be a wy in that I know of.