Me being stupid is the quick explanation, old program used IDE 1.03, that will also teach me to use the same board.
Interesting though using the same board to compare I got the following results
with Arduino IDE 1.03 free RAM on first start would reduce from 616 to 579 to 507 bytes, and remain steady at 507bytes, the new version of my code would save exactly 3 bytes as expected compared to the old version, but the memory usage follows the same pattern a loss of 100 bytes of free memory after about 4 seconds of run time.
With Arduino IDE 1.04 free RAM is 654/657 bytes depending on the version of my code I run and this memory usage does not change over time.
Result a saving of 150 bytes of RAM 3 bytes from my code, against 147 bytes RAM obtained by the simple process of an upgrade. If this trend continues I could just not bother to write a program then after not very many IDE upgrades I will find the program I need already in the library and it will use no memory!
All the best
Ian