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Its odd because the witness is running. however I have a message, via steemd.com, saying witness_shutdown which I cant find any reference for anywhere. Any ideas would be appreciated.

check your logs properly, if it's really running or not. restart it if needed.

Apparently blockchain is corrupted... so re-downloading and replaying.

Yeh corruption may happen if you ran out of hdd or ram space, or a misconfigured shared memory size. In that case, redownload/replay is the solution.

Thanks for these suggestions. Reran but no luck. Will poke those variables and see.