ok Corion - you da man! - Youre reponse pushed me in the right directions - for more investigations. Wow wasted an hour on that... It appears that the original scripts had this included:

> __PACKAGE__->load_components( qw/InflateColumn::DateTime /);
[download]

and newly generated ones not - it seems to be the way that the DBIC was generated from the Pg schema - there is a script (that I used) that does not add this "pacakge" and there are some notes in a readme to do:

    dbicdump -o components='["InflateColumn::DateTime"]' \
[download]

so I guess that was it - not even in the source code! Who new?! Thanks once again for the steer..