Dear all, many thanks for your extensive feedback. You more than answered my question: I conclude for myself that it is not a good idea to use Org tree entries if one wants list items. This was "accidentally" supported by the old exporter, but with the new exporter it makes sense to manually (or automatically, with some scripting or macro-recording) convert tree entries to plain lists. This is what I will now do with my Beamer presentations.
Cheers, Christoph -- Christoph Lange, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham http://cs.bham.ac.uk/~langec/, Skype duke4701 → Mathematics in Computer Science Special Issue on “Enabling Domain Experts to use Formalised Reasoning”; submission until 31 October. http://cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/formare/pubs/mcs-doform/