Permalink Failure

Hey community,
I have tried to scour these forums and the internet at large to find the answer to my problem, but to no avail. I am attempting to use WP’s permalink option but am having a quirky error that I cant seem to tackle.

I am using the /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ option to rewrite the urls. The issue comes up when I try to access a category ( ie /category/food/) the permalink rewrites it to the date followed by the category (ie /10/11/food/ )

To make it more annoying, this doesn’t happen immediately after setting the permalink options. The switch seems to happen after I update a page.

To fix it i can reset the permalink options to the default selection (?p=1) and then choose the /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ option again. This fixes the issue temporarily but then the problem reverts.

I’ve contacted my host, and kept an eye on the htaccess file (which is not being rewritten by anything). GoDaddy says that it is most likely an issue with WP. I am at my wits end can anyone please help me. My client is expecting this site to go live on Monday.