Hi lukeo,

sorry for the belated reply.
That's a very odd situation you are having - I would not expect this to happen.
I wonder about whether it's the duplication function that's at fault, or Chameleon?

Can you try this to take Chameleon out of the equation:

1 - disable all your Chameleon rules, or disable the System Chameleon plugin
2 - assign one of your top-level menu items to the new template
3 - tweak some of the settings on the new template so you'll know when it's being used
4 - test

Do you find that the new template is failing in the same way as it was with Chameleon?

I haven't investigated just how the template duplication function works, but when I created something like that in Joomla 1.5 I found all kinds of issues with trying to duplicate templates. Even with some dynamic PHP code rewriting there was lots of scope for messing up, especially when templates relied on their particular "path" name being a particular thing. (so the duplicate template inherited some stuff from the original template, or stopped working entirely). Again, I don't know if the new system suffers from the same issues but it's worth taking Chameleon out of the equation to test it out.

Hope that helps - please do let me know how you get on. I'm interested in the results.

Cheers,
Stephen

So I made a manual copy of the template and set that to a menu item......... same problem.

Then I set the template copy as the default template for the site, loaded the website, and then swapped back to the original template.....

Now it works!  I haven't turned Chameleon back on, but I don't need it for this so I'll just leave it alone

Thanks for your support.  Hopefully this keeps on working.