hi there,

I have now created the first slave using a template and in tools - tables tab the two slaves look now like this:

dummy slave created as fresh slave and used for template creation has tables
comprofiler,
joomgallery
marked as shared

chrissy slave created from template has tables
comprofiler
core_acl
joomgallery
session
users
marked as shared

when looging into the master I would still need to log in to either of the slaves

even after saving the slave sites again there is no cookie_domains param in any of the config_multisites.php

any chance you could give some advice on how to getting this to work?

To have cookie_domains, you must have the same domain name.
So if you website are on different domain, the cookie parameter will not be produced.

Check also the version number of JMS. (Do you use the latest one)
Check also that you can see the shared table name when you go in JMS tools and put your mouse over the linked tables. If you see the origin of the table, this mean that you can "show views" definition and therefore JMS can detect the relationship between the tables. Otherwise, it will not discover the relationship between the websites. You shoudl review the MySQL user permission to see if it can "show view" definitions.

the domain used for both slaves is:
http://{site_url}/multisites/{site_id}

versions installed:
Joomla Multi Sites version: 1.2.10 (Latest available: 1.2.10)
Patches definition version: 1.2.13 (Latest available: 1.2.13)

the linked tables display on mouse over (with the chrissy slave)
for comprofiler & joomgallery: master tables
for shared J!tables: slv000 tables (dummy slave)

on the template I have ticked the radio button to share J!users and the checkboxes for CB & JoomGallery

have contacted my host about user permissions as I cannot check them myself

The text displayed when you put your mouse over the link is not clear.
Give a screenshot to be sure.

Do you have the name of the "shared table" on the original one.
If YES, this means that your DB allow the show view and the permissions should be OK.

Your problem probably comes from another place but I don't know where.

find attached a screenie of the name of the shared table for the chrissy slave

the core_acl, session and user tables do not have a shared sign on the dummy slave though

table prefix dummy: slv000
table prefix chrissy: slv001

So the DB privileges seems OK.

The problem come somewhere else but I have no other idea except the domain name that does not match the one present in the dummy.