Thanks, the debug log gave me an instant 13 page dump of info, so I just went ahead and added “.old” to the ini filename suffix, forcing a new one to be generated.
All is well again now.
Curiously I had already done an uninstall removing settings etc, but I guess it failed to delete all config files.
debug started thus
D: 09:29:18,263 config.event:261: Config file update requested on thread 12716
D: 09:29:18,285 webservice/ratecontrol.get_delay_to_next_request:122: (‘picard.musicbrainz.org’, 443): First request
D: 09:29:18,285 webservice/ratecontrol.increment_requests:147: (‘picard.musicbrainz.org’, 443): Incrementing requests to: 1
D: 09:29:19,246 webservice/ratecontrol.decrement_requests:155: (‘picard.musicbrainz.org’, 443): Decrementing requests to: 0
D: 09:29:19,246 webservice._handle_reply:558: Received reply for https://picard.musicbrainz.org/api/v2/plugins/ → HTTP 200 (OK)
D: 09:29:19,247 webservice._handle_reply:571: Response received: {‘plugins’: {‘abbreviate_artistsort’: {‘api_versions’: [‘1.0’, ‘2.0’], ‘author’: ‘Sophist’, ‘description’: ‘
Abbreviate Artist-Sort and Album-Artist-Sort Tags.\ne.g. “Vivaldi, Antonio” becomes “Vivaldi, A.”\nThis is particularly useful for classical albums that can have a long list of artists.\n%artistsort% is abbreviated into %_artistsort_abbrev% and\n%albumartistsort% is abbreviated into %_albumartistsort_abbrev%.
’, ‘files’: