weirder and weirder.
I tried to select to subscribe again and repeated this several times but it kept offering only a subscribe option.
Then I went to view my subscribed topics to hope to find a delist option there and I was surprised to see it list two pages of watched topics...
So I did a "clear list" I think it was, it didn't explicitely say it was going to unsubscribe from them all but I assumed that's what it meant. The list was then empty.
But I've gotten five replies since then. But THIS time when I clicked on one email link, it had a Remove option so I selected that. Lets hope it works. Lots of traffic in that thread
thanks for the help and yes I was thinking "I probably shouldn't have posted that problem there" after the fact.