..actually..thinking about what my actual problem was that I played my root level playlist in shuffle mode and I ended up with the following:

assume each letter represents a track from a particular album.

...AABBCCDDEEFFGHIJKKLLMMOP....

This was when I first noticed something funny with the shuffle - but as I said in my previous post, it only ever happened once and disappeared after a reshuffle - i'd be very suprised if this was actually a conincidence because of the number of occurances of this in the playlist....

Adrian