Here's a further update.
I took the notebook I've been having problems with and copied it one item at a time into a new notebook, making sure to copy ONLY "input" cells and NO "text" cells. This was a long process since it's a large notebook, but at the end, the problem does not exist in the copied version with the text cells left out.
So this definitely seems like a bug where the content of text cells is influencing the plots (that appear much farther down in the notebook), and causing Mathematica to hang when the buttons I mentioned are clicked on the plots.
As I said before, the text cells contain a mixture of things like:
- Notes I made to myself, to remind me what I was doing in each step.
- Formulas that I manually typed in so I could remember the generic formulas for calculating things, along with descriptions.
- Relevant items that I copied and pasted from various sources like textbooks or web pages.
I don't understand why there should be such a conflict, since nothing in the text cells is meant to be used by Mathematica, they are simply extended notes and comments for my own information and record keeping. Why does Mathematica not simply ignore them?
I am new on this forum and it does not allow me to post bug reports. I assume that this particular bug has already been reported by someone else, anyway. I would appreciate it if someone could point me to a more complete description of the bug, so that I can specifically avoid it in my notebooks. I don't want to have to make do without text cells entirely, because they are essential to how I use Mathematica.