Hi! Well, in the meantime I found the error and a workaround. It resulted from an (require 'org-export-latex) somewhere in my .emacs because I wanted to add some LaTeX export definitions to org-export-latex-classes. The effect was the the very old org-latex.el (v 6.21) from the original Emacs distribution has been loaded and that didn't work with the rest of the 7.7 org-mode distribution.
I was thinking, that the new org-mode gets rid of old parts. I changed the (require 'org-export-latex) to (require 'org-latex) and then it worked (because the newest org-latex exports org-latex as well as org-export-latex). Kind regards, Daniel