Hi RRPhil
First let me say how massively impressed I am with your posts on here and the rover forums. The depth of your knowledge is fantastic and your clarity of thought and logical approach to fault diagnosis is a rare and precious skill.
I am both honoured and delighted that you have replied to my plea for help

I have tried sport mode and manual and it is better but not perfect. Starting in manual 1st and 2nd still causes a false nuetral if giving it too much gass. The best is manual 3rd but then it struggles with slow takeoff particularly on an incline with the torque converter working very hard. If it was TC slipping causing the mismatch between input and output speeds I would have expected it to show up here too! When taking off in Auto you can feel when it is about to happen - you can feel a slight reduction in acceleration and the revs rise rapidly. If you lift off at this point it engages 2nd and then you can gradually feed the power in and proceed as normal. If you ignore the telltale signs and keep your right foot down then you either get a box of neutrals or it slams into 2nd with a bang. 50% of the time I then get a TRANS FAILURE error which can be cleared by stopping, cycling the ignition, restarting and then starting again VERY SLOWLY. Because I am experimenting with unusual gear selections it seems the software can get easily confused and it has suddenly swapped to 3rd, 5th, 1st and then TRANS FAILURE all when doing less than 20mph!
Is there any tests I can do without removing the gearbox?
I thank you in advance for your precious time
Regards
Stuart Waite

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The older I get the faster I was