Hey Igor and Werner,
Thanks for taking the time to give your thoughts, I appreciate it as this has been racking my brain.
Igor - I'll look into seeing if I can fix the MAC in the driver as I do have that .conf fix file you were referring to. I also may just end up getting a new dongle cuz yeah this thing is old and was cheap.
Werner - Sorry for not being clear on that, I had got the name to change to wlan0 but trying to use wpa_supplicant did not seem to trigger my device to connect to the network.
Cheers