I found the cause of the problem, - though the symptoms were strange.
The problem lay in the default skin setting for the CK editor being set as kama.
I remember when I updated to the latest version, I had issues with not seeing the editor, which was because kama css was not in the folder, but an alternative theme, moono was, so I changed the editor skin to moono and all is well.
I still can't account for being able to see it as admin and not as member, but I won't dwell on that too much.
Job done, thanks for looking into it for me.