AP 1200GTO pointing accuracy?

Well the new 1200GTO arived yesterday and I spent several happy hours last night drift polar aligning it in the observatory(I hate drift aligning). Got a reasonably good polar alignment in that there is no Dec drift in 15 minutes that I can see through the C-14 with 12mm guiding eyepiece (about 325X) and a diagonal. This thing is attached to a pier in the observatory and I used a GPS to get Lat and Lon and one of those "atomic time" clocks to get accurate time. I used the same guiding eyepiece for initial "alignment" on the first star of the evening. The pointing accuracy was reasonably good in one half of the sky say from Vega to M57 and from there to M8 and so on. However from there to say M51 it sort of missed the target. Was near the center of the finder but not in a low power eyepiece. Moved it and synched and it was happy. Also noticed this same problem during long slews when hooked up to The Sky, crossing the meridian and so on. Once it was aligned it put things almost in the center. Thus I have a few questions:

What is the expected pointing accuracy?
How important is the "time" setting for the handpad and in The Sky (set time in handpad to the nearest minute, NOT in The Sky as it was off by perhaps three or so minutes)?
What are some tricks for improving pointing accuracy, if any?
How much influence might mirror shift/flop and that sort of thing inherent in C-14s have?
I am thinking that Tpoint might help quite a bit as I'm planning on using this thing for CCD work with a tiny chip so it needs to put things in the center of the field.
Thanks,
Mike