Comment fields do not concur with iTunes

Lots of weird things happening here...
iTunes sets a comment by:
COMM eng The Comment Here
Play does all sorts of weird things (including ignoring the fact that we just set the comment in the following example)
Dump from start of a tune:
iTunes reports the comment as:
000001A0 000001BB 00000AE2 00000927 00011187 00011187 00008000 00007FE2 00011170 00011170
Play reports the comment as:
000001A0 000001BB 00000AE2 00000927 00011187 00011187 00008000 00007FE2 00011170 00011170
Change the coment to "something" in Play, and close the dialog. reopen the dialog and the data is back to as above.
Change the comment in iTunes to "anotherthing":
Play now sees the comment as "anotherthing"
Change the comment to "something else" in Play:
iTunes still sees the comment as "anotherthing"
recheck it in Play, sure enough it is still "anotherthing"
This is just one behaviour observed - there have been others including Play _WILL_ set the comment in the file, but it differs to that of iTunes, resulting in 2 COMM tags in the file (one with the iTunNORM and one with just COMM eng ...
Incidentally, after setting hte comment in iTunes the result is:
as you can see both the iTunNORM and standard COMM tags are present...
:(
ID3 tags are a complete pain in the but, huh.