With no way to meet the photobucket problem head to head with their geeks, I left a message on their Facebook page...
A little after 6pm this evening I got these replies...
"There is a known issue that we are aware of and working to address. If I hear an update I will pass it along to you. In the meantime, I have applied three free months of Plus 20 to your account".
and again ten minutes later this...
"I believe this issue has been fixed!"
And it has... all the pics are properly restored...
The combination of the loss of the bucket and the runaway mouse has led to a very trying day of multiple full scans with anti virus and anti-malware solutions.
As a last resort (and perhaps it should have been my first resort given that in the event the snags were not related,) was to do a system restore back to the 6th Dec before the last lot of M'soft Updates were applied. I also deleted the original mouse driver software and re-installed the latest version from Logitech. The runaway mouse seems satisfied with my actions and is now on its best behaviour. So hopefully alls well that ends well...