Ok this has laid waste to my entire day -
so in the hope this helps others - cgamberea (OP) if you have *easy battery saver* installed this may be your problem as well, if so here is what I did ---
I had an app *easy battery saver* - which did work wonders for my battery life.
However
I did a hard reset ( with sim but no sd card) with it still installed.
after the hard reset I re set the APN but had ---- settings> about phone > status showing "mobile network state" as disconnected , and no H+ or 3g icon and no access to internet but phone and sms access..
I did another hard reset without the sim and without the sd card and I re set the APN but still had exactly the same problem.
I inserted another sim from another company and still had no 3g or H , but with phone and sms access.-
I trolled for 4 hours and found some people had had problems with this *easy battery saver* - so using wifi I re-installed this app and found that no matter what setting I did , including custom, it would show the data connection grayed out. It would THEN allow me to "green it up" - but as soon as I minimized it , when I called it back up it showed as being disabled again.
NB - in ALL the above situations after the first reset, the settings> Battery & data manager> data delivery screen showed both= background data and data enabled settings as green ticks.
after an hour of more fuzzing around I decided to uninstall *easy battery saver* and THEN do a hard reset with the sim and data sd in .
After this third reset I got my H and 3g back , once I set up the apn again.
It appears that doing a hard reset with *easy battery saver* active on the phone MAY have been the cause of my problem.
this took just on 8 hours of panicking ( not counting 1 hour of fixing up my GF's atrix hotspot connection.
I hope this helps others..