There is the issue, it seems something went haywire during the recent upgrade that has turned off the scheduler, I have tried to enable it via phpmyadmin but get the error as shown. Clues on what else to try before I give up and do a fresh system reinstall?
Upgrade of what? Did you upgrade mariadb, then the following may apply: https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-14990 Other articles I found using that error message with Internet Search Engines suggested adding to php.ini event_scheduler=ON -line.