Hooray! Extrusion now realized.
Thanks for your advice TIG, much appreciated.
Summarising:
- All Profiles and Rails must be welded curves - even straight lines must be converted.
- Use plugin weld.rb to weld
- Convert a straight line to a welded curve by select > divide > segments ~30 > weld
- For small objects best to scale up > process/extrude > scale down.