Well, after doing some tests with both versions, it seems that fixing the combing artifacts in the 480p file yields better results than fixing them in the 576p file. So I'm going with that.

And you were right about that DEFT bullshit. Good news is, I can isolate the affected shots and deinterlace them with no problems. The only exceptions are a couple of shots where the last frame of one and first frame of the next have their fields blended.

In a couple instances of this, deinterlacing works perfectly. In most, it doesn't work at all.

So what I've done with a couple of them is just repeat one of the frames from either the end or beginning of one of the shots - this only works when one (or both) shots are static, with no movement.

For shots where I can't do that ... well, they're just going to have to stay fucked up. I mean, they look exactly the same on the PAL DVD, anyway, so even if you're watching the official disc, you're gonna have to deal with this issue. Therefore, I'm not going to stress too much if I can't fix problems that were always there.

--edit--

Example of one of those "blended field" shots I was talking about:

Annoying? Yes. Fixable? No. Present if you watch the retail PAL DVD on your TV? Absolutely. So I'm not going to worry about trying to fix this, since it can't be fixed.