peterH, the time taken is relative to the size of my arduino sketch and how many different library functions are used. In this case it would take me a couple of hours to trawl through the librarys and build a pure C file, not too long but even so I'd like to know how to do this in the future.
Yeah I tried the verbose output, since I tried it on my windows machine the temp files are in some folder that isn't there, (C:\Users\enyquist\AppData) . I'll try it with a linux distro.
pyro_65, arduino's 'preferences.txt' file is in this same elusive AppData folder, god I hate windows. Again I'll try this on my linux box, really shouldn't be that hard.....