Thanx for the swift reply.
I run the import manually, choosing the folder to search for new albums explicitly. I replaced the symbolic link with a bind mount, but that does not make a difference.
I am wondering if my recent transition has something to do with it. Recently I moved (or rather copied) both my library and audio files to the Linux system. An experiment to see if Linux is the way to go (as opposed to Windows) for my soon to build dedicated streamer. After copying everything, I used the library tools to rename all the files in the library. I played from that system for a few weeks, without a problem. Yesterday it was the first time I tried to import a few new albums, which sadly fails for some reason.
I can not imagine the issue having anything to do with the recent Windows to Linux transition, but you never know. The only thing that strikes me, is the display of filenames in MC. They show up with backslashes and not with the forward slashes I used when renaming them and how one would expect on a Linux system.