Thanks for the reply Marc,
I did try the older jquery and the older version of SPServices and the results indeed made an appearance :)
I will see if it is in my remit to work on Peter's code and get it to work with latest SPServices & Jquery etc. , otherwise the workaround will be to use the older versions of scripts for the moment I am afraid.
Not sure if you are aware of any other global navigation across site collections solution which is available out there ?
Thanks
S