Found the problem. Old, stale, flexi-streams installation. Snagging a new one and recompiling meant that (setf flexi- stream-bound) suddently was in existence and my faffing around now works. Thanks for the clues, Robert!
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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