I solved this, but I'm leaving it up to help others
I found that the \webassist\plugins\shopping_cart\checkout_form.php was rather easily worked on in Dreamweaver to update the labels.
I also removed the states, terratories, islands and countries I didn't want here, and all was well.
Lastly, the asterisk I added caused a line wrap, and I found that the cms file default_form.css contained a rule .publicForm LABEL; there I increased the width, and that worked. I didn't increase it by much or it might have played havoc elsewhere.
