thanks for the reply and for checking out the site. i also tried a vpnme server had the same issue.

following your advice i checked out the man page for openvp and the closest i could find to send all traffic to vpn was

--redirect-gateway [flags]: Automatically execute routing
                  commands to redirect all outgoing IP traffic through the
                  VPN.  Add 'local' flag if both OpenVPN servers are directly
                  connected via a common subnet, such as with WiFi.
                  Add 'def1' flag to set default route using using 0.0.0.0/1
                  and 128.0.0.0/1 rather than 0.0.0.0/0.  Add 'bypass-dhcp'
                  flag to add a direct route to DHCP server, bypassing tunnel.
                  Add 'bypass-dns' flag to similarly bypass tunnel for DNS.

Checking the config files the vpnbook config had this command but the other two did not.

Still the same problem. comparing the config file i found this

route-delay 2

also unique to the vpnbook file.

by adding this option as well, problem solved

from man

--route-delay n [w] : Delay n seconds after connection initiation before
                  adding routes (may be 0).  If not specified, routes will
                  be added immediately after tun/tap open.  On Windows, wait
                  up to w seconds for TUN/TAP adapter to come up.

so how that helps, i have no idea, but it does.

It would be interesting to know what this site does different to the others though,They seem to specilise in detecting proxies etc and it seems they have found a vulnerability in openvpn , but one that can be easily overcome. how many people are there using openvpn that would be unaware of this ( i only discovered by accident) and surfing thinking they are anonymous while they actually are not?

cheers