Hehe, already there funky. Immediately after posting the last message I added in the object checking to my script 
Cheers for pointing out that it came back as an array, I'm more used to mel's structure than python's but you have to mess with type casting and checking them more than what I'm used to (PHP related background where you dont need to declare types).
I've now got two shelf icons, one for toggling the selected object(s) xray and another for doing the same with a selected objects material (e.g, selecting an object with a lambert3 material and making all objects that share the material semi-transparent). They might be useful for modelling at some point 
Back onto particle scripting...
Si