I have put this here hopefully to help others who may find the same issue.

I had updated an old view from Views 1.6 to Views 2 which had been working perfectly well for ages.

The view was inserted into a node, but the format was not exactly as I wanted, so I tried this and that to fix it, but it didnt fix.

I hadn't payed attention to the Views Preview, as it meant I needed to use an argument and I was being lazy, the node had the argument so i can save time and ljust refresh the final page. What I hadn't realised was that the views preview was showing how I expected my results, as it used to be in Views 1.6. So why wasn't my inserted view displaying correctly, the format was sort of wrong, but not!

What was happening was the first 2 nodes of the view when using Insert View, were incorrectly formatted, (unfortunately that accounted for the whole screen height), The remaining nodes in the view however were correctly formatted.

Weird !

OK I remembered there wss a way to embed a view using php, so I tried that and it gave the correct output format as shown by the views preview. So why was my Insert View not working, were all working from teh same code arn't we ? Nothing had realy changed from my Drupal 5 installation. I was just about to blame Insert Views for doing something when I stumbled on the cause.....

I had too many closing div tags in my views template for the view being inserted

It seems that in Drupal 5 (views1.6 and insert view), Views 2 embeded view, and Views 2 Preview, the extra divs are ignored, but when you come to insert it in Drupal 6, the end result is broken output,

So if you get a simialar issue count the number of defective nodes in your view and look in the template for a similar number of extra closing div tags

Hope this helps others I wasted 3 hours on a silly coding error that was a year old