New page stuck as front page

I created a new page and it got stuck as the front page. When I deleted the page the root url gets diverted to the url of the page that I created (and later deleted) so I get a 404 error – Nothing Found. “Reading Settings” are still set to display latest posts as Front Page. This is the third time this happens. The only way I found to fix this is to delete everything and do a fresh install. Rather frustrating. Is there another way to fix this?