Thanks Mark, I had used all the pins on the remote control unit, and it intermittently missed reading the thumbwheel switch connected to pin 11, ( which VW uses for rxdata - which I am not using, and dont initiate ) so I declared pin 00 ( RXD ) as the VW Rx pin, and all worked.
What a weekend ! 20 yours a day since Thursday to get this finished by last Sunday ! whoops 