We revisit Atiyah and Botts study of Morse theory for the Yang-Mills functional over a Riemann surface, and establish new formulas for the minimum codimension of a (non-semi-stable) stratum. These results yield the exact connectivity of the natural map (C_{min} E)//G(E) --> Map^E (M, BU(n)) from the homotopy orbits of the space of central Yang-Mills connections to the classifying space of the gauge group G(E). All of these results carry over to non-orientable surfaces via Ho and Lius non-orientable Yang-Mills theory. A somewhat less detailed version of this paper (titled On the Yang-Mills stratification for surfaces) will appear in the Proceedings of the AMS.
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