yes sorry should have made it crystal clear, the objects are all in data tablespaces and its purely the metadata information for all those objects that is making the system tablespace so large.

Partitions are only part of a table of course but 60 odd partitions are better than 500000 objects.

I think we're going to try the move within the system tablespace first (including the new 10g shrink segment commands) and if we can't reduce it significantly we'll see if we can live with it performance wise, if not we'll test the transportable tablespace idea.

Thanks for your input peeps.