Thanks Mark,
I think that must have been the problem. I deleted Firebird and reloaded it and now I have managed to get to the examples and also started the creation of my own database.
I was mislead by the appearance of the Connect or Create prompt in thinking that Firebird was running. presume that must have been the client , not the server?

Have now got The Firebird Book finally delivered by Amazon so have checked all is running as expected.
Have first two tables created but not yet populated.
thanks for help.
John Payton