I think the default values for the autoUpdate options had somewhere been lost. No idea why but it fit the conditions. Glad it’s all back on track. You should now be able to one by one reverse the changes we made along the way

I foolishly removed the “scripts debug” code and It all went back to the same problem as before.  It’s back in and working again.  Is there any problem with leaving it in there?  Hope not.

There may be a small performance hit. It is most odd that the compressed version is perhaps the issue. Perhaps I was wrong at the start when you asked about reinstalling… perhaps you do have a corrupted file there. If this IS the case then we are only talking about the admin bar plugin files. If you want to download that again and overwrite the current admin bar plugin files then it might be worth a try. There are no inherent or known problems in the scripts within that plugin – we use it here for example! But a corruption is a remote bit real possibility…