Well, I did a general upgrade and it upgraded Catalyst too (and a bunch of other modules). Serves me right for always wanting to be the first on the block with the newest modules (and not doing a general back-up beforehand). In the end (see "Update 3" on the original node) it had nothing to do with the upgrade, but all with a line in my application code that got commented out.
CountZero
"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law