I've successfully altered the difficulty to a setting of my choice, using PPCoin QT version v0.4.0ppc-beta. I think i'll just stick with this client for the time being as I don't require any additional functionality that PeerUnity offers anyway.
Please do tell though if the dev team manages to fix the bug. Thanks again!
Received feedback on the bug
https://github.com/Peerunity/Peerunity/issues/176It's exactly as I thought. The "magic string" was not matching correctly between the Peercoin reference and Peerunity wallets. The reason it worked for you originally was due to my web control panel using the wrong string, just as Peerunity was. I 'fixed' it about week later based on the reference wallet, which broke it for peerunity.