This paper has been motivated by earlier work of the first two authors (see [3] ), where distinct Nielsen classes of generating systems for a Fuchsian group
have been established and, in the case of odd and pairwise relative prime exponents π(i),classified. As a consequence they could distinguish nonisotopic Heegaard decompositions of Seifert fibred 3-manifolds. In proving that these decompositions are actually non-homeomorphic (see [3], Section 2), they investigated the question whether the different Nielsen classes of generating systems for G remain distinct, if one passes over to the weaker notion of “Nielsen equivalence up to automorphisms” (see [12], p. 3.5, 4.11 a-c): this means that the automorphisms of G are added to the Nielsen equivalence relations on the generators.