started looking for missing/faulty earths so I was looking inside my control box with power off (of course) when I noticed the 12v switching psu for the laser, it's power on LED was blinking on every 20 seconds, that was odd so I disconnected all my cables except for the power lead and it still happened, I pulled it out to do more checking on the bench with a different power cable and it did not happen, put it back and it did happen, replaced the power lead with a heavier spare one, put everything back together and all the issues disappeared, the P2 pin was now showing 20mV and did not jump around with joint movements. Tested the old power lead and it appears fine, so other than having a lightweight cable replaced nothing else has changed.
Seems weird to me.
Thanks for everyone's input.