In a very breif nutshell this is what i did to fix it.
1st get vista booting again
To do this i used the vista boot disk and selected the repair your computer option followed by startup repair, i think i had to reboot and do it again as far as i recall but it did it in the end.
Finally reinstalled grub
First i used my ubuntu live cd and in a console ran
$ sudo grub
This puts you into a grub shell.
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
This will return a value which looks like (hd?, ?) this is where you will find /boot/grub. '?' will point to the specific partition of your disc which contains the boot grub for example (hd0,1)
grub> root (hd?,?)
Use the value from the find command eg (hd0,1)
Finally the command which will install GRUB into the MBR.
Finally the command which will install GRUB into the MBR.
grub> setup (hd?)
grub> quit
Reboot and my Boot menu worked again :-) yay
Hopefully this will help someone.