flintdk

Hi Viktor,

Just want to say thanks again for the help. I tried re-installing wordpress core – the problem persisted. And I disabled the cron jobs as you suggested and the problem went away. So I downloaded a plugin ‘wordpress core’ and tried running the cron jobs one at a time to id the bogey – but when run on their own none of them seemed to change the address url setting!

I reckoned there had to be something corrupt somewhere – this behaviour was just too odd. And the site was oldish – it has had several themes, and many, many plugins over the years. So I thought it was time to clean house.

I set up a second, test site. Installed a fresh copy of wordpress. Installed the current theme/child theme and just the currently used plugins from scratch. Exported all the content from the live site and imported it into the second test site using the wordpress importer. And then manually copied all the configuration from the live site to the test site.

And the test site was perfect. No wierd font problems – everything just as it should be.

So then, tedious as it was, I reversed the process. Completely cleaned out the live site, installed wordpress from scratch, etc. etc.. And at the end of all that I’m where I want to be. Everything is stable and working.

I guess there was too much baggage there or something got corrupted over the years. Anyway – it probably takes three or four hours to rebuild the site from scratch, so not the worst in the world. And I’m glad I did it now as everything works and I have the added bonus of having a ‘clean’ install with all the baggage of the past gone.

Really appreciated your input – when I come up against ‘a wierd one’ like this it’s always great to have someone to do the odd sanity check on my approach.

all the best,
flintdk.

Hi Viktor,

Thanks kindly for taking the time to reply. I apologise for being so slow replying myself – some other commitments got in the way! In answer to some of your suggestions:

-> It shouldn’t be hosting that’s changing the setting – I host it myself and it’s about as straightforward a setup as you can imagine.
-> Am I right in saying it “shouldn’t” be a plugin (as the problem persisted with all plugins disabled??).
-> The setting is definitely saving from the admin backend. If I look at the wp_options table using SQLyOg after changing the setting I can see the changes reflected in the database (in fields ‘wp_options.siteurl’ and ‘wp_options.home’)
-> I looked at editing the functions.php section on the “Changing the Site_URL” page you linked to above – but there’s a large, bold warning there saying “Important! Do not leave those lines in the functions.php file. Remove them after the site is up and running again.” I have no difficulty changing the settings remember – it’s just that they won’t stay set.
-> Just as a note – I haven’t changed or moved the database.
-> You mentioned ‘Edit functions.php’ twice – I assume the second one was a typo and you meant ‘wp-config.php’?? Anyway – I have added some hard coded values to wp-config.php to test. With the hard coded values added there, the settings in the wp control panel get greyed out. But after a day the fonts still disappear. And if I remove/comment out the wp-config.php settings I can see that the db settings have indeed changed again!

Very mysterious. I think I’ve played with this enough – I might dump the wordpress database, do a clean wordpress install and see if that fixes it.

Any other suggestions (other than the nuclear route) much appreciated,

Regards,
flintdk.