> Reading up on distinct-values, it says that I am to assume 
> the default collation as case-blind, but after testing, this 
> is proving not to be the case. Is there any way I can force a 
> lower case comparision?

The default collation for distinct-values() in XSLT is the Unicode codepoint
collation, so upper-case and lower-case are considered distinct. The names
(URIs) of other collations are implementation-defined. In Saxon you can get
a case-blind comparison using

distinct-values($input, 'http://saxon.sf.net/collation?ignore-case=yes')

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/