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foinaven, if you have the values of K I L O you can work out 1ac. As the answer minus A has few factors you can work out the values of P and H.

I've checked the results against the middle digit of 25ac (which I'd already entered) and it seems to work.

Thanks Wintonian, much appreciated.

Unclued, from what I remember I found four possibilities for K from 4D, 1A resolved the value of I by range of entry, which in turn reduced K possibilities to two possibilities. 22A being a 2-digit answer finally resolved K.

After a frustrating day yesterday with my usual 1st abortive attempt, I cracked grid A around 3 hours ago. I have 16 2 digit numbers in grid B from the 32 I have transferred, and am now sick of grid staring or looking at cell phone numbers/letters and have come to a complete halt. I get the missing unlucky number, and I also notice the complete absence, in both grids, of a lucky number. I have still no idea what grid B is supposed to represent, so cracking the cipher seems impossible!

Thanks all of you. I now have the values for M, I and K. I make P=10. The mistake I made was to put 4dn as 34 instead of 44.
Onwards and upwards........There's a long way to go.

P=10 is correct

I'm also stuck staring at a completed Grid A - any hints as to how to progress from there appreciated ...

To gitto and uncryptic, and anyone else struggling with Grid B.

Following the preamble, you want a systematic way of associating each digit from 0 to 9 with either two or three letters of the alphabet, so that each of the 26 letters is associated with one and only one digit. By "systematic", I understand "capable of being expressed as a simple rule that applies to all 26 letters".

There is an obvious (at least when the penny has dropped) way of doing this that allows Grid B to be completed according to the instructions. Grid B as a whole then represents a thematic word that would be encoded to the same sequence of five digits as the encoded version of the puzzle's title.

I'm sure that you will get the systematic cipher in the end!

Try adjusting the title by moving each letter back or forward by the same number of letters eg by one letter REJOB becomes [QS][DF][IK][NP][AC]. Paste each option into the wordfinder and you shouldn't have to test more than 10 to get the the thematic word:

www.cfaj.freeshell.org/wordfinder

Sorry, that should be:

cfaj.freeshell.org/wordfinder

I just tried that. QDINA etc, didn't get anything returned. Wouldn't expect to, either, for those letters or the ones which followed. Are we looking for anagrams ?

Surely it's not that difficult, there are what appear to be 16 door numbers surrounded by 5 words. But 'mailbox', 'intercom' etc all have more than 5 letters, so aren't the 'thematic word'...