Well, just so all who tried to help know, I was never able to resolve this problem, we even had a discussion in IRC involving a couple of Devs and GM's.. It is indeed a freak issue. the Version.dat file is created by the updater program itself, and as i had never run the updater in version 017 the file just did not exist. Anyway..... If any windows user ever has an issue with the updater, you may want to try the Java updater writen for mac users.. worked a treat for me, and i have to say i will use it from now on!!