Audioguru:
I tried your suggestion as shown in the circuit diagram.For safety reasons I added a 10E resistor in series with the plus line.I got the best results, just as I wanted in terms of heat dissipation in the transistors without shorting the diodes and C2 and not removing the R2.As everything was perfect except that the 10E resistor was heating up as the current through the resistor was 400mA.
On removing the resistor the circuit current shot to 700mA and conditions went back to the previous state.The NPN transistor got much hotter than the PNP!
Is it advisable to use two capacitors of 470uF/35V in parallel instead of single 1000uF/35V in the output?