I finally got around to fixing this. The key resource was http://orgmode.org/manual/Installation.html, and the solution boils down to two things I was doing wrong when I tried to install through the list-packages
:
Remember to start have emacs running without having opened ANY org files or org-config settings. Best way to do this is M-x
kill-emacs
and start again withemacs -q
.Add to the top of your .emacs file:
;; Configure before loading org mode (package-initialize)
(package-initialize)
I've written a little more about it here.