I found a work around…
basically i went through the scripts line by line and found that it was something to do with the import of TF and keras… moving these two to the start of my import statements seems to have fixed that particular issue.
import tensorflow as tf
from keras.models import Sequential (previously in another script which was causing the protobuf when it was called)
Thanks for the guidance @snarky - it really helped a lot and i understand whats fundamentally going on to a point but fixing it via that route seems like a real pain!