Hi Chris,
So you are saying that “Preferences Updated” messages are the ones that you keep seeing? I missed that in your message above. I see what you are saying now. That is a bit worrisome, because unless *you* change something and click “Update”, then you shouldn’t see that message.
Are you confident that this installation is pointed to the correct database? There is absolutely no way we can get access to your live site? We are just very limited in what we can offer for troubleshooting without seeing things first hand.
At the time I wrote it, yes, I was seeing “Preferences Updated” on each reload of the admin interface, no matter how many times I dismissed it or reloaded. That seems to have resolved itself. Yes, I’m confident that things are set up correctly, excluding whatever is causing my initial problem, that is.
Please don’t read any exasperation into this, but I’m genuinely not sure what it is about the secondary site that isn’t providing enough to look at. I set it up using a fresh ee install with MSM and all my plugins, etc. (to see if that would solve the issue, it didn’t), but pointed it to a duplicate of the live DB. I changed the settings to point to my two test URLs rather than live. The only thing I didn’t do was copy over the multiple gigs of uploaded files in my uploads area (used an alias instead). Yes, I know that leaves a lot of stuff screwed up over on the front end (primarily due to me disabling pretty much every add-on a few steps ago), but it’s the back end I’m concerned about. My thinking was that, since the behavior was the same in both, this would allow you and I to work together to do whatever was necessary to resolve the issue, and then I’d just duplicate the fix on live. Since then I believe I’ve performed each of your instructions on both the live and test sites.
So, yes, I could give you access to the live site and DB. This just seemed a safer way for us both to work. You let me know.