So i turned on some debugging and found the error for the VE was as follows:
"<PATH_TO_MY-WEBROOT>/w/extensions/BlueSpiceWatchList/resources/bs.watchlist/util/tag/WatchListDefinition.js"
The bs.watchlist is lowercase but on my server it was BS.WatchList and this was causing an error. after i renamed it to all lower case, cleared caches etc all is well with the world…