Ok ignore below, fortunately I found myself in a chatroom with a blender user and he talked me through it 
Complete noob to blender. I am failing to clear the first hurdle. The background is too dark for me to really see what I am doing. I need to quickly make the window color a bit lighter before I can do anything. I have my monitor up to the brightest it can go but am still getting eyestrain.
I did find my way into user preferences and changed a few colors in that but it doesn't seem to get applied to the main interface, so what shall I try next?