I have been talking to (ie emailling with) the Register a fair bit about this, but mainly going over the emails.

Something that did emerge was that I was able to access the website using an inventive hack that I spent hours putting together:

Opening a second tab in the browser...

I kid you not - it worked consistently in Firefox and Chrome, on both my main PC and laptop, and in Ubuntu as well as Win7 (on the main PC).
That came as quite a surprise, and I was able to transfer some funds over and buy some Euromillions tickets, which was nice.

A few days ago that stopped working :-(