Hi all thank you for your help. Through trial and error we appear to have solved the immediate issue if not the actual issue itself. That is to say we've got EPS to work without fully appreciating why.

My designer had a contact you had an older version of Illustrator... namely Illustrator CS3. He then sent his Illustrator Cloud EPS file created for us to be opened and saved in the CS3 version of Illustrator and hey presto... EPS shows without errors or problems with colour or space.

So it would appear that, on the face of it, unless anyone can demonstrate otherwise, perhaps the issue is that Xara WD9P doesn't/cannot communicate fully with Illustrator Creative Cloud, even when that software tries to save the EPS file as an earlier version such as CS2, 3etc...