further news from next level support ...
"Thank you for your reply. I apologize for any confusion, the errors Myles was seeing were related to some of the settings in your php.ini being out of date. To resolve this, I have updated /home/markwebb/public_html/php.ini to reference the correct version of Zend Guard Loader. I have also raised the timeout for your script as suggested by the plugin developer."
so i tried ago & creating the package ran for longer but still came back with an error. i suspect i might have to give up on this !
...
AJAX Response Duplicator.Pack.Create
duration: 540.443 secs
code: 500
status: Internal Server Error
response:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, XXX and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.