Been at it for nearly eight hours. Done everything I could think of not to mention trashing and reinstalling as a result of the ATI driver install. Ain't no way compiz is going to work in this installation which is odd because I got 3.8 on two other machines and compiz works fine.
Thank you Pam, and people, for the benefit of your collective wisdom unfortunately it was not meant to be. Not on this machine anyway.
I guess I'll just reserve the disk space for 3.9 which ought to be here soon..