ah ok folks. Well first everyting worked as expected before the update to DCS today, but the other unknown is the addition of my rudder peddles which I thought might make my joystick behave differently...
so I have a 4-way hat on my thottle (52 pro) and this has a second shifted function that I have set in-game (mapping) for moving the aiming camera.
Within VA I mapped the joystick by going to settings - P2T - (will use a single channel as an example here) double-clicked Transmit TX1 press - hit "When I Press Button" - pressed the HAT left (VA registered as joystick 1 button 27
I then did the same for release, then the same for TX2 using the HAT switch right.
So this worked perfectly, well still does. Except the button seems to work shifted as well (using the joystick pinky)
Now, to test this I just went and tried re-assigning TX1 with pinky and the LEFT HAT, and when I did so it displays
Joystick 1 + button 27 + Joystick 1 + button 6,
So clearly the software can see the button mappings ok. For some reason, however, VA sees any press of 27 as valid whether it is just 27 or 6+27. I do not want it to register 6+27! It did not do this prior to today, and I have suggested what two things have changed today and that is all!
But I guess something more significant is happening due to the fact VA recognises my commands but does not want to push to ATC anymore too but I will retry that when this is sorted as I can test this outside of DCS...
Does that kind of make sense?
Oh and yes I am using VA and VAICOM sorry about that.