Hi!
Yes, during my tests I had already given thought to the aspect ratio but that's definitely not it since the small border exists all around, not just either vertically or horizontally... had it been the aspect ratio then it would have used up all the remaining space for either the vertical or horizontal edges, see what I mean? It was interesting to see my Kindle 2 go into sleep mode, it displays a picture on the screen and even that picture had a small white border around it so I *believe* that's hard-wired, but I wanted to make sure.
Regarding landscape mode, personally I prefer not to chop the page in half, I want to be able to see the full page all at once, and as long as I can get rid of as much margins as possible I think it's pretty readable for me. Landscape would mean that things would get chopped in half, including sentences.
Regarding the max res, you may be right, I was simply going by their official specs. I can email you the PDF and .prc file if you like... I'll see if I can get your email from your profile when I get out of this editor.
I just tested by removing the 600x800 override, no difference.

But as I'm typing this, something funny just happened... I was converting a full PDF using the settings I posted (654 pages) and something weird happened... the dos process finished and windows explorer opened up to the temp page holding all the png files (is it supposed to do this? How come this never happened before). Being curious I looked through the png's and they are perfect, I mean not a single white border to be found, they are all shaved to the bone. This means something's definitely up, if the png images are perfect then either the process that's packaging these png's into .prc is adding a border or the kindle has a built-in border of its own. Anyway, I close out of this temp folder I realize that the output file isn't there. That's two weird things in a row, I've spent the past 6 hours testing and this hasn't happened before. Fishy!
Also, I've noticed an artifact... on my Kindle reader, there seems to be a blank page inserted here and there in places where there's no blank pages. I checked the generated png's and they're fine, no blank pages there so either it's something in the .prc generation or it's a Kindle bug.
Regards,
Anthony