Nope, just me being dumb... I used a page_layout_section.tpl for the main section and had the pagelayout.tpl as the catchall.. i.e. page error, this page would then wait three seconds and bounce you to the home page.
I found that if i do this, the preview function within admin does not work as it seems to use a different section from the one your in, to display the page. To solve the problem i removed the section_layout and replace the code in pagelayout. I don't get the nice page not found message, but i get previews, which is what i needed.
I'll need to do some tests with this for sites that have many section displays.....
Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development