For anyone interested, I re-commented the "BaseRewrite" directive in my .htaccess file
and so far, all is working as it should.
The only file I needed to edit in order to access the site links and
admin area of my processwire installation was my httpd.conf file,
where I made some changes to the "Allow Override" directive,
I then restarted apache with, service httpd restart ,to ensure apache
picked up on the changes to the httpd.conf file.
There is also a "README.md" file included in / with the processwire download
which gives some good clues to solving such issues, well worth taking a look at.
Regards johnp