Thanks for this, but I have concluded that the wrong question was asked!
Firstly I don’t use WP and am helping a friend, (you might ask why!) so my confusion seems to be between users and members. In the dashboard when I click on ‘All Users’ I come across a list of 600 people and their roles are visible; not just the usual User roles of administrator, author, editor etc, but also what that persons membership level of the BSC is http://www.bscine.com i.e. full member, patron, friend. Perhaps this is how WP does things. In myphp admin we were told the the ‘nicename’ was the column to update to get all the statuses back to normal (which is where the hack appeared to be as all users/members had been given ‘admin’ status). I now realise that is not so and perhaps you cannot change the status level info in php. But where are peoples profiles stored, for admin to edit?

Thanks, sorry for being long winded

There seem to be various plugin relevant to users and profiles:
Theme My Login
WordPress Users
Members (A user, role, and content management plugin for controlling permissions and access. A plugin for making WordPress a more powerful CMS.)
WP User Manager

I suspect that Members is the one, hence I have given the blurb about it.

Thanks for help

Frank

Yes this looks like the place to help. a list of problems is now being compiled! also told that some widgets are not performing as they should, so all fun.

thanks for help

Frank

I think the route of all of this is the fact that on the widget page there is no side bar, so hence the widget problem. This appears to be quite common and is usually caused by incompatible plugins. But i have disabled all the plugins and no change. Some say it is a corrupt upload and advice to reupload WP_admin folder. so i will give that a go.