Well, time's gone by and I'm still no closer to an answer to this extremely frustrating problem. I've just scanned an image onto my desktop with the intention of importing it into Lightroom. It was initially pdf ( LR doesn't see it...) so I open it in Photoshop Elements, convert it to JPEG, save back to desktop, try to import it into LR, nope, still doesn't see it.
I'Ve now got several photos that LR refuses to recognise. This makes absolutely no sense to me...