Strange to post a solution straight off, but i've been trying to fix the problem for number of days and fianlly solved it!
My N95 arrived on Tuesday from Orange (i am aware of how much Orange stuff up the default software on every Nokia) anyway the obvious first thing to do was to hook up to media player and try to copy music over. It was a no go, new hardware manager continually opened with 'New MTP Device Installed' and nothing i could do would make the N95 talk to Media Player.
The solution arrived this morning in the post! A 2gb SanDisk MicroSD memory card (cost �17 delivered from eBay). It would seem that the connection software will only allow windows media player to stor music to the memory card, and without one the software simply hangs indeffinately. With the memory card in and formatted, and some initial phone crashing and media player crashing (on trying to initiate first contact) its now running very smoothly takes about 4 second to upload each song which is nice!
So there we go, having similar problems connecting to media player without a memory card, then its time to go shopping again!