So in playing around with some stuff last night, I discovered that on the individual entry archives, in the little triptych of links at the top of each entry (previous entry | MAIN | next entry), the next entry was always (erroneously) pointing to the most recent entry. Which is … annoying.
When I poked at the error a bit more, I discovered this behavior was true for all the blogs on my installation — i.e., it was not (as I first guessed) a template error, but something about my MT installation as a whole.
I went to the forum and found this thread, which seemed to match the problem, and I took the “reinstall the entire php/lib directory” route — which sounded plausible because of frequent problems I have with getting full FTP loads on my MT installs, but which also cause problems because of those frequent problems (eventually resolved).
But that didn’t solve the issue.
I then found this thread, which, even though it was for MT 3.32, seemed to fix my problem under MT 3.33, i.e., in the php/lib/block.MTEntryNext.php file, delete out the line that reads “‘lastn’ => 1,” Save the file, and, hey-presto, everything is working.
I hate hacking the source files, but it did the job. So I’m posting this here so that, next time I upgrade, if the problem recurs I’ll know how to fix it.
Alas, this fix has not solved my Monthly Archive problem (i.e., that it loads up every entry in the blog, not just the month in question).