cheers dude, had next gen working perfectly then kaput effects not working! a problem a million other people have seemingly run into. Spent about an hour trawling these forums and the net til I found your post and immediatley realised a homepage slider i had implemented must have been conflicting with the nextgen scripts.
wish i had the ability to fix the conflict occuring through modyfing the plugin files, but thankfully including the script for the slideshow specifically within the homepage template works for now an i can go to bed. Hope other find this post as once you realise what it is it can be sorted fairly promptly.