Many congratulations to _Mike! He wins the contest!
He has matched the requirements on many of the criteria and actually broke the code itself some weeks ago with the key ' basic ' which he sent by PM to me.
A sterling effort to crack the cipher and a nice bit of code written as response to the problem, also of note is rewriting the original from C#.
thanks to Kryptkat also for additional entry, maybe now you have the key it will all make sense...! :-)
Attached is the source article which was encrypted, i have copied this from the webpage below, for the challenge i reworded some of it to avoid including numbers and also removed whitespace and punctuation etc.
Babbage Difference Engine
thanks to all for interest and comments, i still gonna post that indepth lecture on encryption history and one time pads though!...erm maybe not haha!
cheers!