What have you done to troubleshoot?
Disable all plugins to see whether the anchors appear. If they do, then enable the plugins one by one and check after each to narrow down which one was causing the issue.
cubecolour, thanks for your reply. To troubleshoot, I have just messed with the html… if I disable plugins, I assume that I will lose all of my settings… nonetheless, it sounds like several hours of work and I was hoping that someone might be familiar with this type of issue or be able to view my sourcecode and identify a likely culprit – but if that is wishful thinking for this type of forum (this is my first post), I will end up taking your advice as a plan B… sure hope it’s not an issue with a plugin that I CAN NOT LIVE WITHOUT. It would seem to me that an anchor is such a basic feature (similar to a link) that a plugin would not typically conflict – that would be strange… I’m reading a lot of noob WP posts out there, so I really have no idea if the “plugin-conflict” information that I have been gathering on the issue carries any weight. Seems strange to me.
Most plugins do keep their settings in the database if deactivated & reactived – I can’t remember the last time I encountered one which lost its settings without any warning when deactivated. So that shouldn’t be a problem. Try it first with a plugin that has just a couple of easy to remember settings if you aren’t sure.
I think this should be plan A. Blindly messing with HTML probably won’t fix anything if a plugin is causing an issue.
No one can help you troubleshoot a plugin issue if you dont know which plugin is causing the issue. If you can narrow it down, the plugin author or someone familiar with using the plugin may be able to work with you on a fix.