Thanks Trisha,
When creating a new post, the most used tab in the Category metabox is for categories, is it not? Regardless, every category, tag and taxonomy is “missing”.
Editing of that particular file was the last thing I did before this problem occurred, just offered it for good measure. I understand it would not (necessarily) have anything to do with this problem.
The categories and tags are completely gone from the backend, and I cannot actually add categories to any post type. As I said, they’re still visible in the “most used” tab in the metabox containing the Categories available on your site, but I cannot assign any post a category or tag (new or current), nor can I see them when I add/create new ones in admin, but they are added and visible in the database.
It is not possible I’m confusing tags and categories. “Mysite.com/category/’X'” where ‘X’ is any category, will not appear, because the categories are seemingly ‘missing’.