Done a little more investigation. If I select another static page (like the download page” as the “Front Page”, and the blog page as the “POsts Page”, then t he blog page still looks like the home page. I’m tearing my hair out here.
I have fired up a default wordpress installation, and this works fine. Nothing like my live site does. The instructions from my first post work perfectly.
What could be causing my live site to behave so differently?