I contacted websupergoo the makers of abcpdf who responded quickly with the following...
"These scaling issues can arise when someone remotely logs into your
server and changes the screen resolution, out from under Internet
Explorer and ABCpdf. Our newer versions of ABCpdf handle this
situation better."
I can confirm this is the problem in our situation RDP'ing to the server with different resolutions can effect the output of the abcpdf component. More detailed information on the problem is as follows.
"On some machines we see interactions between the video driver and
MSHTML. On these machines MSHTML doesn't like the screen resolution
changing and can change the way it handles content if this happens.
Typically this occurs when someone logs onto the machine either
locally or remotely using a different screen resolution."
As a resolution to our problem we are going to include in our code a check for the desktop resolution, if it has changed the service will be restarted. websupergoo provided us with some sample code for checking the resolution, the code is property of websupergoo so unfortunately I can't post here.
I hope the info above helps others with the same problem.