Categories hogging permalinks!

I’m having a pretty frustrating problem with our permalinks, and nothing seems to be working to fix it.

1. We had a category like “Example Category” with a slug “/exampleslug/”. (Notice – this is not a page or post.) The permalink structure was set to “Custom” with “/%postname%/” set.
2. Because that category was related to a page we needed to create, we changed the slug to “/exampleslug-posts/” and created a page with “/exampleslug/”, but the page’s permalink kept changing to “/exampleslug-2/”.

We’ve tried everything – deleting the category altogether, deleting the page, clearing trash, changing the permalink structure, etc.

Also, if you create a post or category, you can have the slug be “/exampleslug/”; however, when you create a page, the permalink is ALWAYS changed to “/exampleslug-2/”. That leads me to believe that the internals of WP is missprogrammed in some way to clear the permalink cache for posts and categories, but not pages.

We installed your plugin, but it keeps saying that it can’t find any permalinks and doesn’t seem to do anything, regardless of what setting we use.

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/remove-old-slugspermalinks/