Does anyone know at what point you should get these done within the whole process.

if i had got these done in the first place i recon i would have knocked off about 2/3 months off the whole processing time, worst comes to worst and you get them done again

hi pharo,
it depends how quickly you are planning on being there!
you have 12 months from the earliest of these two dates to validate your visa, not 12 months from your visa being granted! So if your not in any immediate rush, wait for them to be requested.

yep good point, depends on your circumstances i suppose, some applications can take much longer than 12 months which would result in your checks expireing if you had frontloaded. Meds arnt to cheap either.

As late as possible. Make it the last thing you do before submitting teh application. Gives you more time to validate your visa.

Yip leave them right to the last as your year before validation of visa starts from date of medical.

Hi Everyone thanks for the advice. I will wait til advised and resist the temptation to front load. Aiming for early in new year say Feb Mar. Hopefully.

Pharo,
We are a family of four and our first Police check was dated 06/02/2005. Our visa application went in on 15/03/2005, medicals requested from DIMIA on 28/06/2005 and sent on 05/08/2005.
We to also decided to 'front load' the application by getting the Police checks done early, we now find ourselves with an unsold property and no response from DIMIA yet (hopefully the next week or so).
The upshot is we'll be left with some tough decisions to make before February 2006 both work and investment wise in the UK, with possibly all of us going over to validate the visa's but myself coming back for a few months to wrap things up in the UK.
My advice apart from drinking heavily would be to leave the Police checks as late as possible to give yourself breathing space towards the end of the application (unless you have skeleton's in the cupboard you're worried about!!!!!!!!!!!) - hope this helps.

but as police checks only cost ten quid or so then i suppose if you dont mind losing a tenner you could allways wait until the police check has a couple a months left and send away for another one, then post it to immi a few weeks before it expires

As I understand it your entry date is based on the date of your police check + 12 months. You could renew it and get another into DIMIA but it takes circa 7-9 weeks and a reply date from DIMIA is anybody's guess! I suggested renewing ours but was told by our agent that at this stage it would only serve to confuse/dalay the visa.
In hindsight I'd probably now leave it until the medicals were requested to give a bit more slack at the end of the application/entry date.