Sorry I did reset the head unit, several times and tried wiriting the garmindev.xml onto several cards, all to no avail.
Perhaps if I could donwload the one mentioned i.e. 2013.20 EU, successfully, then I maybe could try writing that again, at least I would be able to see if there were any additional files written to the SD.
I'm sure the fact that the icons on the screen and status bar are missing is related to the current map / internal memory, perhaps getting corrupted, but I do not know how that can be access to remove what is on there and start over again, other than perhaps by downloading the original files.

For fun, I even copied the garmion folder and it's contents to a fat32 formatted 16gb USB stick, and ran the GE update tool again this time using the usb stick and not the sd card, exactly the same, i.e failed to download the update.