Wow, thanks for the speedy replies and suggestions. I actually solved it with the help of some of the above suggestions. What I had to do is first of all, ignore the attributes palette as you are working, because if you are expecting this to keep updating to whatever class you are on, you'll be waiting... and because this is what i was relying (as a kind of visual aid), believing that every time i would go to create an object it would appear as whatever settings were visible in the attributes palette. It seems this palette just 'stays' showing the 'global' attributes (mostly).
Anyway, I'm digressing...
The solution was going into the "tools>organisation" panel, and selecting ALL the classes at once (i pick top one, scroll down, hold shift and pick bottom one, then click "edit..." Under graphic attributes, tick the "Use at Creation" button (as others above have correctly suggested). The difference this time is that you are choosing this option for ALL the current classes you have in your file. You will get a warning asking if you want to change all existing objects previously created into the object default attributes of each class. That's up to you guys, but imho a dangerous move, as sometimes we all create objects in a particular class that do not necessarily have the same attributes as the class style (different line thickness, etc). Anyway, I said NO to these individual warnings for each class.
And that was it. Done.
Bottom line: it worked perfectly. Every time I changed to a new class to begin an object, although the "attributes" panel did not change accordingly (avert your eyes), as soon as i created the object, sure enough it appeared (every time) with the attributes of the current class. I know it's sad... but I'm so happy right now! I have finally solved this issue (4 years it has bugged me).
Thanks again for the suggestions everyone, and i hope these really badly written instruction will help anyone else in the same situation.
Kind regards,
Gordon
