Stubborn Permalink

Ok… I’ve been back and forth on all of the forums on this one, and I haven’t found anyone that’s had my same exact situation. Here is the order of what happened.

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.

Another weird and important symptom – 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.

Please don’t tell me to just look through my trash (which is the answer I’ve seen “work” over and over in these forums) – we’ve already tried that several times.