Jab, the darned same thing happened to me this afternoon. Fortunately, I gave your suggestion a try, and it worked for me.
I didn’t deactivate all of my plugins, because some of them are just too troublesome to reactivate — they require setting up once again, or submission of passwords or licences.
However, whatever plugin culprit was responsible DID happen to be one of those I deactivated.
The experience was troubling because a week or so ago while amending a post on each of two different websites, the Visual editor failed. It would display nothing in the post editor on either website. And each time I tried to preview my new edited content, only the old content would display.
Since a couple of my plugins are special graphic-rich extras that require the blog editor to be in Visual for the customized buttons peculiar to these plugins to display, I was in a desperate fix. Much of the content of my posts include the fonts and special graphics that these plugins provide. I thus need to work in Visual, switching back and forth constantly from Visual to HTML.
But with that new problem, I had discovered that if I switched from HTML to Visual to see if anything would show up there, my amended HTML would be gone when I returned to HTML — only the old HTML I was trying to amend would be there.
Thankfully, the Firefox Lazarus add-on saved me the few times I made that switching misjudgment, for I would forget and inadvertently make a Visual switch. It was conditioning, I guess.
At the end of a long and wildly frustrating day, all I could do was save my new edited content for both posts onto a Desktop document, and hope that things righted themselves the following day.
Well, the next day, those two posts on the two different websites were still screwed up, but I found that I could edit normally on other posts. Visual worked fine. Somehow, each of those two posts on separate websites had become frozen with whatever the problem was that had plagued them on the previous day.
And no other posts of either website were suffering.
I had read of a similar issue in an old forum thread a year or two old, and one member said that the workaround for him was to open up a new edit field as if he was creating a new post. He transferred the HTML he had saved into this new field, then switched the editor to Visual to do the specialized graphic changes on content that he wanted. When that was done, he then switched back to HTML.
After that, he copied that HTML, and pasted it into the troublesome post he had been trying to edit. Since he knew that the content was now exactly what he wanted — he had been able to preview it in the new fake post’s editor — he simply published it.
Thankfully, this worked for the sick posts on both of my websites.
With all of that trouble so fresh in mind, today’s tribulation had me inordinately disturbed. I appreciate that you posted about it, and included your method of recovery.
