Not quite sure why, but I was able to create a list from the site, edit it using notepad++ (really nice plain text editor), and reupload it to the site. The changes took! The difference here was that I did NOT change the name of the file.

Earlier in this thread I saw mention of naming conventions. Can we get a better explanation as to what is required to upload as far as the names required and any other item that could cause a problem?