I installed the widetext package and was happily using it until I decided to edit the style file widetext.sty. Happily, LaTeX immediately picked up the changes and compiled correctly. I then decided to undo those changes to widetext.sty, and I did so, but now latex doesn't seem to pick up this fact (ie it still thinks the changes are present). If I rename widetext.sty to something else, LaTeX properly fails to compile and says it can't find widetext.sty. However, if I intentionally put garbage text in widetext.sty to cause the latex compile to fail, LaTeX doesn't seem to notice and happily compiles the last "working copy" of widetext.sty it seems to have stashed in some form of cache somewhere.
I tried to delete all output files in the working directory. No luck. widetext.sty is located in C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\latex\widetext. Thoughts?
Best Answer
Ok I figured it out I think... Unless I'm mistaken, it seems the problem had nothing to do at all with latex. It seems somehow Windows 7's file explorer might have been at fault. Namely, whatever changes I made to the style file and saved, when I opened the file again, the changes were apparently still there. However, when I copied the folder containing those files OUT of the administrator folder Program Files to my desktop, and then opened the files in the folder now on the desktop, the changes had magically been reverted... I don't quite know if this is a known issue with Windows 7 or if I'm misplacing blame here or even if I'm misinterpreting a "feature" of Windows 7.
Conclusion: Now things are working and to fix it, I had to move the folder containing the style file out of Program Files/Miktex to Desktop, make my changes, then move back to Program Files/Miktex.
Thanks anyway everyone!