thank you for your replies... it is overall pretty complex.
I did put in a lot of effort (months) into getting the police to investigate but have given up (temporarily anyway) due to the time involved and the fact that UK police can't even investigate paedophile cases due to lack of resources let alone a stalker ex-boyfriend.
I work for a very small company, single router, no proper network to speak of as such. the only device that I actually have online at home these days is my live cd laptop, no phones or any tablets connected, printers etc. I changed ISP, nuked & reinstalled hard drive, clicked on nothing malicious, added no infected devices to the router, and within hours, the laptop had been compromised (easy to see that time, was an additional user in the user folder).
I could flash and change dns on the router daily (found a dummies guide online!) but the VPN and disc is my preferred option - I've had to reinstall so many operating systems its a question of why try to keep them out when nothing really works when I can just use the disc permanently, that is if I can trust the VPN etc. if the VPN option will work, then I'll be perfectly happy to use that and just continue to get on with my life, which is what I have been doing for the last year, although at times the hacking issue has been, to say the least, irritating as hell. I can't even use a mobile phone as they just hack it, read all my messages and then comment on them on their Twitter pages, strange but I assure you, true.
still, if the livecd and VPN can be trusted then I would be content with that solution, for the time being... I can only trust that though if I am sure that the password cannot be extracted from the livecd files in some way?