I went out and bought a different bluetooth adaptor for Win PC and laptop to test if is hardware related. Retailer website and driver download site list Vista as supported, product wasn't so it went back.

Managed to pair and browse successfully using cli (bluez-simple-agent & obexfs) so it would seem the problem is with blueman and gvfs. Why pair button and setup wizard have 2 different scenarios is beyond me. I would say that obexfs is actually giving a more reliable connection than any other method has been for a long long time.

GVFS code you mentioned gives:
I need to do a little more digging, map-client is giving a dbus noreply error at the moment all the time.