New iPad will not let me access settings for mail, contacts calendars

I certainly have. I have also tried "Erase All Content and Settings" without success.

Thanks for those thoughts.

I had set up two hotmail, one yahoo, one gmail, one exchange and four pop accounts (with accompanying smtp servers) within a couple of hours of purchasing the device. All had verified correctly and in a timescale of minutes or less. They had been operating for the entire week before the problem arose.

This morning decided to take a "sledge hammer" approach and did a complete restore via iTunes on my PC. I did not reinstall any of the email accounts initially. I then set up each of the email accounts in turn, checking that each one functioned correctly, before uninstalling again and going on to the next one. To my surprise the problem came back not, as I half expected, when I installed the exchange mail but with my oldest (and longest established) hotmail.com account. A further observation is that the mail app stayed in the "downloading mail" state before it dropped out. Checks using Outlook, Blackberry, Windows Live and my iTouch showed no similar problem with this account - and a hotmail.co.uk account worked just fine. It's a mystery!

Now I'm a bit nervous about reinstalling any hotmail accounts so I've left the device email-less for the time being!