I've tried refreshing, clearing the cache, opening in a new browser, renaming it from index to category.php-- ALL but one category display the correct template. I'm beyond stumped.
One clue is that if I omit the loop from the template, the sidebar shows up. Otherwise it gets the 'cached' or previous version of that template page.
So it turns out that some wacky code was inserted by either the Wordpress content editor or the author who added it to the post, which I highly doubt. It was some commented out randomness, that while being a part of the post itself, broke the whole page.
Hopefully this ridiculous problem/solution is found to be helpful by someone else. Oh. Lee. Chit. This was a pain in the ess.
Wanna see it? Starts after the date:
<p><em>Tuesday, August 13th, 2013</em></p>
<p><!--<br />
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }<br />
–</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><a href="http://www....
