dbramley, I have exactly the same problem as you, with ‘.’ in the category base. I don’t want to remove the ‘.’ (which does resolve the problem, but clearly changes the links – I guess I’d have to setup a bunch of 301 redirects for all my categories). Maybe this is the only way until they fix the problem ??
Mine is now fine too! My privacy settings were correct, and the robots.txt file existed, so I’ve no idea what was happenning, but it seems miraculously to have fixed itself!
Thanks for the feedback.