ok so this, richard, is the point i was talking about, yellow arrow. the purple area was formerly too far to the left, leaving a very weird shape that i wasn't happy with.
all good. ok i'll move on to checking the ground planes and power planes. PADS has this annoying habit of, when you join up two tracks, it goes "oh that completes a loop... i'll just do the job of tidying it up by DELETING all those GND VIAs you so carefully put in..."
nggggh so you have to keep an eye out for that :)
l.