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I hope I won't make myself unpopular in asking people not to ask for or reveal the key. It seems to me that the whole point of this puzzle is an exercise in deduction, and the setter has taken great care to construct a grid that, in combination with a number of very accessible clues, enables the key to be worked out.
A handful of answers that overlap the central grid are enough to establish the positions of seven letters in the Playfair grid, including the first letter of the key and the last five letters of the grid. From the same answers it's possible to deduce what column a couple of other letters must occupy.
Without that process of deduction, the puzzle has no point, hence my plea above.

Mm. Not looking a great deal better this morning. I have quite a few of the answers that go into the code box but do not see how this helps if they then have to be coded.
IPA?K and then TLQ on row four and WY at the bottom though these might become YZ if X is used in the code word.

Is the 3rd letter of 23 ac I or O as both make sense to me.

Good point

mt49er, You're right. The third letter of 23a could be I or O. I found this ambiguity in such an important entry very annoying. I veered towards I because the Chambers entry for _ _O _ doesn't fully support the definition of the singular form of the word. Later work established that the third letter is indeed I.

Rickye, 23a is a crucial entry, because the last two letters of the answer coincide with, and encode to, the first two letters of the Playfair grid. There is only one way this can happen. It might help to consider the sample Playfair grid provided, where the first two letters are UN: what two letters in the sample grid will encode to UN?

Thanks Dryden. Just back from a heavy lunch so will give it another go when the brain gets back into gear!

Dryden - don't you mean the last two letters of 23a coincide with, and encode to, the first two letters of the encoded Playfair grid? Or, supposing the keyword were UNSCRAMBLED, are you saying that the last two letters of 23a would encode to UN?

Dryden means just what he says. The first 2 letters of 23ac encode to the first 2 letters of the playfair grid.

For a similar reason, 41ac is a crucial entry to get.

In the sample RU will become UN so I guess P is the first letter? Thanks for your help Dryden. I feel inadequate!

But elsewhere, people are saying that the central 25 squares are themselves encoded according to the key. So if the key were UNSCRAMBLED, you would not see UNSCR on the top row in the completed puzzle and IP will not encode to UN but something like QR. I'm still confused as to which is the case.