It appears my second post got deleted?
Anyway I have figured my macro issue out and it appears to be related to invisible characters.
When I set my macros up for the first time I cut and pasted them from this forum into the macro button. They appeared to be fine with no extra spaces, no misspellings etc but as described above they didn't work or they were flaky.
I was told that a cut and paste into a button will bring with it "invisible" characters that you cant see but your client will try to parse.
To fix this I deleted all the buttons I had been working with and created entirely new ones. Instead of a copy/paste I typed the macros in by hand and now it all works.