Some category/tag permalinks returning 404

I recently found out that some of my category archive and tag archive were returning 404 pages. Not all but just some.

I spent some time digging through posts on this forum and I found out that the only categories and tags with the same slugs were returning 404s. Basically, if the category slug was the same as the tag slug, WP would get confused.

First off, I think that this is a bug! WP should be able to make the distinction between tags and categories.

However, I tried changing the slug for one of the problem categories and the result was the the matching slug for the tag was also changed.

If WP does not work with common slugs between categories and tags, how am I supposed to change them if it doesn’t allow me to do so?

I also want to mention that using the default permalinks works just fine.