WP Not Respecting Cropped Thumbnail Anywhere Except On the "Image Edit" Page

This seems to be a common issue that has no response because people answering focus on whether or not plugins are conflicting with WP’s “normal operation”, or issue with theme… So let me start there: I have a new installation of WP 3.8.1 and I’m running the standard Twenty-Fourteen theme that comes with it and I’m still having problems with the image crop.

I upload an image and then select “Edit Image”. I crop it the way I want the thumbnail to look and select “Apply changes to: Thumbnail”. Hit “Save”, it saves; hit “Update”, it updates. And in the “Edit Image” page everything is fine. Every time I open “Edit Page” I can see my full image to the left and, then, smaller and to the right, the cropped thumbnail I chose.

The issue is that, EVERYWHERE ELSE, the thumbnail displayed is the classic WP thumbnail cropped not taking into consideration the content of the image. For example, when I choose to add a “Featured Image” in my post and enter the “Media Library” there, the thumbnail I see for my image is not the custom cropped thumbnail I’ve made. When I select it, in my post’s “Featured Image” section I don’t see my custom thumbnail but the original WP one. When it displays the thumbnail on the user side of my blog, again, no custom thumbnail, only the original.

As I say, ONLY in the “Edit Image” page do I see the custom cropped thumbnail I selected. So this has obviously nothing to do with theme, as it is the very WP “behind the curtain” User Interface that reproduced the error.

I’ve gone into my WP-CONTENT/UPLOADS/…/ folder containing the problem thumbs and find that there are two thumb files. One is MYIMAGE-150×150.jpg (WP’s original thumbnail) and, the other, MYIMAGE-e1395335097151-150×150.jpg (which, I’m guessing, because I haven’t checked it out, is the same name plus the timestamp). I add this info in case this has something to do with it all. Because I would guess WP would replace the original file with the custom one instead of just filling my upload folder with unnecessary files. And that, instead of calling the ‘new’, perhaps timestamped custom file, it’s still, through some config. error, calling the original thumb.