While working on my sharepoint development machine today I was mucking about with variations and doing a proof of concept. Now I know they worked before but for some reason when I created a new page in the source site they were not being propagated through to the variation label sites. In Centeral Admin under the Timer Status I found that the Variations Propagate Page Job Definition and the Variations Propagate Site Job Definition were both stuck at 0% and Initialized, see below:
Seeing this, I now knew that the Timer service was not creating my variation pages and sites so a quick check under the windows services control panel applet revealed that the Windows SharePoint Services Timer Service had been shut off. Turning this back fixed my problem.