Well - after a gnarly session - I have found a few things, and I think may have solved my problem.

If anyone has the problem of models appearing black with this shader, you might look at lightrange=.01, I changed this to .0001 as reflected in the shader collection scripts, now Matts origianl ps 30 shader started wokring ....had a bugger of a time tracking that one down - and am very curious as to what and why??

As for the light popping on and off, I modified the 2.0 shader that I had to accommodate 6 lights, and now it seems to be working well. could have been a bug in my code as well.