sorry for delay, have been snowed under with work and organising my vacation

I deleted everything out of /etc/openvpn, and removed the "status" and "log" lines from the config files which I'd put in /home/user/openvpn, and then it worked just fine. The keys, status and log lines had specified absolute paths to the certificates and files (to /etc/openvpn/blah) and that's what upset the gui client. By removing the directory paths it fixed it.

Seems to be quite stable now, thanks.