Peter: I can't thank you enough, not only for miraculously fixing my file but for showing me the trick of using Tagged Text. I can see that being extremely useful in the future.
I knew that somehow deleting the text frame would resolve the problem and I achieved that in a much more crude way (by deleting copying, deleting the whole tex frame and then pasting back in and reflowing text) . However, when I tried your method on my current file and template, it seemed to have fixed something else—perhaps a bad preference file or something? I'm not sure but, in any case, I can even unlink in other files now as well.
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to help me out with this problem 