Thank you for your reply, yes, tried in ie8, ie9, and firefox, I am going to try a fresh install of v1.1.3 this morning and see what happens. I installed v1.1.1 on my server at home, all options were available, so in worst case I may set store to v1.1.1. There are two things that may be causing issue - it is not on root of site, and I changed the your_admin path during install. So like I said, I am going to try fresh install of v1.1.3 and see how that goes. UPDATE - tried fresh install in both subfolder and root of site, dropdowns still blank, going to install v1.1.1, still no good, thinking issue may be with host which is 1and1 ok I will call this one resolved and can be deleted if necessary - just installed v1.1.3 on hostgator account - all works great - issue must be due to incompatibility with 1and1 - if anybody has any ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.