Hi Luis,
Thanks for the pointers.
first i tired just gem install mysql that failed.
I copied over libmysql.dll from MySQL installation to my Ruby bin folder, tried again, that failed too.
I tried
gem install mysql2 --no-rdoc --no-ri -- '--with-mysql-lib="C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6\lib" --with-mysql-include="C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6\include"'
That compiled and returned a success message.
I'm going to uninstall MySQL as I've had this version floating around a bit and have just updated it to 5.6. once thats done I'll give the solution in the
https://github.com/brianmario/mysql2/issues/372 a try.
I'll keep you posted on my progress.
Thanks again for your help and support.