Thank you for the reply
Unfortunately none of the suggestions worked - I've had "ENABLED BLIZZARD VEHICLE BAR" turned on all the time, and I can see it works when I'm actually using a vehicle, but not in this situation, which suggest that we're not talking about a vehicle.
Your other suggestion did change the bars as it should, but instead of showing the action bars for the "possession" all it did was show the original action bar 1, meaning that it showed the actions linked to my character 1 through 12.. It kinda sucks, but hey, I'm multiboxing, I might try a different setup on all of my toons and see if some kind of combination of things will make it work