Uninstalled, reinstalled and it works like a charm. No idea what happened there. I've also posted another bug report, with some odd event chain results with decadence (posted today, still close to the top of the list), there may be a chance that whatever oddness was going on with my install was affecting things here. Not sure what could have gone wrong, I haven't installed any mods and tend to stay fairly hands off with things 'underneath the hood' (with CK2, beyond hunting around for a corrupt ironman save months and months ago, I just run it from steam and never look at the file structure). Thanks for looking into it, and sorry it turned out to be an install oddity.