[ilife13 (David)]

Matthew
Yesterday (daylight indoors) I attempted some of your suggestions and the results are:
I chose the Moon as a first reference and the scope slewed to point South instead of North (although the elevation was roughly correct). I then chose Vega as a second reference and the movement from the Moon would have been roughly correct.
On a separate start-up (after switching of and re-setting to the start position) I chose Antares and although the scope slew in the right direction it was still 40+ deg out. I did several shut downs and start ups and something stranger happened. On every second start-up, as soon as I pressed "enter" after being prompted to set the scope horizontal in the start position it immediately slewed clockwise at full speed on the Dec motor. The scope slewed about 40-45 Deg before it stopped and if I pressed the stop button during this unprompted slew, it would stop for a couple of seconds and then immediately start again.
I use a battery pack which I am sure is fine but I will check it as I can't afford to leave anything out. I do not have a cable to operate the scope from my computer but I think I should buy one to eliminate that as a possible solution.
I also reset the gears from + to - as you have indicated they should be negative for the southern hemisphere but the motors definitely run the wrong way. This was done after the scope slewed South instead of North for the Moon. When I did this, the scope did slew to the North as it should but it pointed below the horizon. Remember that other reference stars did slew in the right direction with the gears set to positive. There seems to be very little consistency if not random in slewing to various objects. Although the hand controller displays the positions of these reference stars and the Moon correctly (same as Stellarium) everything is extremely mixed up.
One thing to remember is that this mount was working fine initially but after several months of poor/cloudy weather and me being away overseas, when I came to use it the next time I took it to the country for dark skies only to find that the battery in the hand controller had died. As it was only one night I didn't spend much time trying to reset it. I ordered a new battery (which was the correct one) and was fitted to the controller (also done correctly, I am confident) and it hasn't worked since then.

I will do some more hopefully tonight and give you more answers to your questions and suggested procedures.
PS. I have taken a couple of photo's of my set-up but I don't know how to add them to this post.
PPS I have checked to make sure Latitude and Longitude are set and in the correct order.
PPSS I tried the pointing West set up to start but it is no better.

Best Regards
David