Thanks Joel,
All together there are around 40,000 files of which about 10,000 have
links, I only need to look at the linked files I now have a list of
all the linked files, I need a way of going through the 10,000 files
and where the link is invalid break the link and maintain whatever
data is there and where the link is valid leave those links in the
workbook, using the global search and replace method on the test files
on the test server with the new mapping has corrected the link paths
but any path that is invalid and would have been invalid on the
original server had they been updated recently gives #REF errors
everywhere.

I hope this makes more sense

Cheers
David