I placed everything on a protoboard with an AMS1117 3.3v and 5v supply, and its all working lovely (well 4 hours of lovely) GPIO0 is floating, but it appears to be happy collecting Temp/Humidity from a DHT11 and sending it to Thingspeak.com. Running off a battery for now. Will see how it runs overnight and then switch to a 5v ultrasonic sensor and have it send me a Growl alert . I think the cause of my problems was the fact that everything was previously on a breadboard with loads of wires everywhere acting as antennas and picking up noisy crap.
Very impressed by the range ability of the ESP-01. It is sitting in my garage 25m metres with any issue.
Appreciate all the input Keep it coming for others to see.
loiphin.