[Plugin: NextGEN Gallery] Error: “Tables could not created…” on activation

Hi all. Great plugin, using it on several blogs. Just attempted to activate NextGEN on a new one and got this error message:

“Tables could not created, please check your database settings”

I’ve checked my database settings and the database user has full rights, etc so I’m not sure what’s wrong. Anyone come up against this one before? I couldn’t find anything on the internets, except for one Spanish post that reported the same problem but didn’t appear to be resolved.

many thanks