Well I thought I got nothing to lose so I'm gonna open up the player again and run a jewellers screwdriver tip across all the chip memory legs I can find to try and force a hard reset.
I had to prise up the big battery, It almost covers the whole pcb,
and keep running the tip across the legs shown on the photo.
Every now and again I would get the usb connected sound, but one time I got the new hardware found notification, so I just pointed it to RK27driver folder in the SFLOUPGRADEKIT, and bingo it installed the Rockusb driver, I quickly ran the RK27DM.exe and yes the "R" button was now active so I clicked that and got several dialog boxes in chinese so I just said YES to all of them. The program seemed to fail after that. So I disconnected the player and reconnected but no 60Mb partition the main one popped up so I clicked on it then and formatted it and then copied RKusb.tag to it and disconnected and reconnected again.
Then up popped the 60Mb partition, the teclast firmware had only partly installed but enough was done to fix things so all I did then was copy by backup folders in and my player was back.
So with some determination, the SFLOUPGRADEKIT (thanks again makd), problem sorted.
BTW notice the Wolfson sized pcb pads to the bottom left of the PCB