I upgraded xotcl-core and xowiki to the latest on HEAD at the same time. If I copy the code back from the previous versions of both xotcl-core and xowiki, it starts working again.
I definitely needed to revert xotcl-core.
It appears xotcl-core is not backwards compatible, the xowiki code from previous versions doesn't work with the latest xotcl-core (AFAICT)
Any ideas?