Cheers Willypete this is the second time you've helped me out here, I do appreciate it
the link does kinda help - but only in so far as confirming that there is no easy work around for this problem (at least not till css3 when you will be able choose whether padding is addedd to the width or not, wether microsoft will bother to make their browser compatible remains to be seen) so I have abandoned padding and am using margins around the contents of the box with a separate div tag
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