thanks guys i worked it out.

commenting out the includes was the most obvious thing to do, in fact i did it long before i asked for help here.

for some reason though i wasn't smart enough to seperate the base.rc into seperate pieces.

once id broken that into desktop, systray and task files i soon realised that it was systray causing the problems.

a bit more investigation and i realised it was the iconsizing command causing the problem.

systray2 doesnt support iconsize (well at least there is no mention of it here http://www.flatface.net/~namaide/lsdocs/)

i'd just gotten into the habit of using it because i generally use vtray which does support the command.

thanks for taking the time to read through all of that anyway