Turns out there are variants of the opening invication too. I managed to eliminate about a third with the fix you suggested, another third by deleting everyting after then [/html] tag, most of the rest by setting the search to case sentitve and going after 'a Href', and I did the last dozen or so by hand having tracked them down using just the Notepad++ search function.

I think I got them all, even the ones on Alex's old school website which is effectively a directory of mine. Thanks for your assistance.

In passing I also updated the broken index.php scripts (no idea how or why they stopped working, but there you are...), weeded out the last vestages of hard links to my old site address, corrected some indexed that were faulty or incomplete, added archive pages for 2009 onwards (the material was mostly there but there was no way to find it), updated the indexes to my own stories, and updated the copyright and left column menu bits.

Okay, the site gets less than a hundred hits a month these days, but at least the spam harvesters will be able to navigate.