I've got round this role assignment thing temporarily.

As users cannot register for the site accept through purchasing a subscription or by me creating them, I have set up a workflow so that when they log in, it checks to see if they have the subscriber role and if not, assign it to them.

Works for now.

--EDIT sometime later--
Spoke too soon, of course all this does is give the user the subscriber role, but doesn't set any expiry date.

Tried looking at the 'Recurring fee' module but it looks like there is no way to set that up with PayPal at the moment and not being a coder, there's nothing I can do about that it seems.

Can't use PayFlow as I am in the UK and the only other module I've found so far is something called lm_paypal but the last release of that was over a year ago!

All in all, I can't see how I'm ever going to get this to work and it seemed such a straightforward thing to do. Very frustrating.

As I'm runing out of time having spent 2 solid days trying to figure this out, I may have to revert to something simple like a Wordpress blog and a separate static part of the site to which access is controlled by the standard PayPal subscriptions setup.

Seems a shame as Drupal/Ubercart seemed to have so much promise.
Tim