Thanks Jason,
I've been carrying out several tests on this on different machines thinking it may be a glitch on my office laptop, but it appears that eCart just doesn't create the database tables - also there's text on the wizard screen relating to this that says something like "eCart can create the tables for you from a preset, if you want to have it do this click the use preset checkbox" (that was paraphrased) but there's no checkbox on that screen, only the preset drop-downs for default local/remote, powerstore or sage and I've tried different ones.
The issue of the css validation tooltip isn't a big one because we wouldn't use those anyway on the final site so if you can't reproduce the bug maybe it was something I was doing wrong? It would be nice too if we had the option NOT to use these css tootips and just use the default HTML 5 field validations.