I'm making progress and permissions do seem to be the
problem, this is how I have progressed:

dmesg|egrep 'sd5|home|mount|filesystem|ERROR'
ext3-fs: mounted fs with ordered datamode

the permissions on ls /home :
drw-r--r-- 2 777 root 4096 Feb..... Recycled (644)
drw-r--r-- 777 root 16304 Jan..... Lost & Found (644)
drwxr--r-- 71 walter walter 4096 Feb..... walter (744)

ls -ailgd /dev/sda5 :
3378 brw-rw--- 1 disk8 21 Feb 27 /dev/sdb5 (/home
part'n 660 yours were 640)
brw-rw--- 1 disk8 ......... /dev/sdb3
(/ partition) 660)

fstab entry for home /dev/sda5 :
UUID=.................................................... /home ext3
defaults, errors=remount -ro 0 1

The /home permissions don't look right. You said I needed drwxr-xr-x
= 755 on the home partition so I did :-

chmod -R 755 /home and got the following:
drwxr-xr-x 2 777 root 4096
drwxr-xr-x 777 root 4096 Recycled, also Lost & Found
drwxr-xr-x 71 walter walter 4096 walter


Well I rebooted and got that haunting drum role back and into my long
lost system, so nearly there.
I see above the disk permissions may not be quite correct but how do I
change those?.

Some programs and functions would not run so I do not have correct
permissions in some areas yet, and got the following errors which
suggests I need more write/execute permissions.

Error 'can't overwrite existing read only value /apps/deskbar/keybinding
.........................................................................../apps\
/gnome-settings

I did a search but could not find /apps, could you hlep me to locate
and correct this?

I appreciate the help from yourself and Jim and have now got my
system nearly there.
If any of the above suggests I can further resolve the permissions
with your help it would be most appreciated. Would there be a better
command/routine to reset all the permissions to default value?