OK. impatient as I was, I posted to soon. The podcasts are still showing up. Sorry abou that...

My tracker.conf has an empty WatchDirectoryRoots=. and an empty NoWatchDirectoryRoots=;, and after tracker-processes -r and tracker-processes --hard-reset and a mediaplayer re-index everything on device (internal and sd memory) shows up in the mediaplayer...

I'm lost, so any definitive advice is appreciated.