--follow up ... It turns out I was authenticating fine all along but had not explicitly granted rights to the role Authenticated in the wiki's securty tab and that the response from zope is to ask you to login again and again (rather than say "you are logged in ok but don't have the rights to to this"). Once a few of these had been ticked and with the default role for a ldap connection to be Authenticated then things started to roll. Great stuff and a good steer from Jens on the roles thing. However it only works in IE and not in NS4.7 (our orgs official browser/mail app). Basically, when you click on editthispage, NS opens a view that does not contain the textarea with the structured text etc. It displays just the wiki header and wiki footer with nothing in between (well a blank line or two) Editing the source shows that the text area really does exist and saving the page locally and the loading into NS shows the text area! Confused and perplexed ... I am thinking that this wiki issue not ldap one so for anyone following this up in times to come then ldap is groovy and the thread closes gracefully. J