At some point in the past I seem to have added avahi via pakfire but I dont really need it so I removed it.
Now every time I boot the system I see “windbindd”, “cupssd”, “nmbd”, and “smbd” all reporting missing libraries either libavahi-common or libavahi-client !!
Re-adding avahi corrects this - is there a way around this or am I stuck with avahi ???
That looks like you have samba installed and that requires avahi to be installed. Avahi is also a dependency if you have cups installed for printing.
Leave it in place.