First of all thanks for your help and input. I did indeed try disabling and re-enabling W3Total Cache and manually refreshing the cache again. Neither offered any improvement.
One of the last things I did was fiddle with permalink.php and that also did not have any impact on the issue.
To be honest I kind of lost patience a bit and decided to simply load a backup copy of the site from a few days ago and that worked like a charm. Not the most elegant solution, I know, but it worked and my site is back up and running. Based on everything I wound up reading about W3Total Cache and the problems people have been having with it, I think I’ll be switching to a different plug-in in the very near future. Thanks again for your prompt response and help.
