Odd. The difference here probably has something to do with the fact that I am applying the patch in windows using a windows version of patch.exe and running it using the following command:
patch -p1 --binary < ..\\auctionhousebot_005b.patch
Perhaps git apply --check does something a bit different and more stringent. When I apply the patch - I get a number of messages regarding offsets for the specific positions - so while the patch will apply with some fuzzy matching, it may be that by default git is requiring a specific positioning match rather than allowing a fuzzy match. Make no mistake, the file I posted is a "patch jockey" job