Solved this, but want to document it for anyone who sees it.
Today I had another issue with my top nav menu.
When I rendered my note blog, the standard Fargo nav menu appeared. Since this was different than the behavior I reported in a previous post ( documented below ), I thought it might be a result of the prefs outline not being public. I am sure it was public at one point, but I decided to try a quick fix. In Fargo with the cmsprefs outline tab selected, I clicked File->Get Public Url.. and then just clicked OK.
Rendered again and it worked.
====OLD ISSUE====
Last weekend, my outline would insist on rendering with a menu that didn't exist anywhere in my outlines any more ( including any conflicted copies).
I still don't understand where Fargo was "finding" my old menus, but my previous issue was only during the period when Dropbox was suffering from a bug.