My site wasn’t updating on the frontend. My RSS feeds weren’t working right. Low and behold, it was this very issue. I followed your removal tip and it fixed the site. Excellent, thank you!
I’m sorry (and surprised) to hear that this happened. There must be some conflict with another plugin you are running.
In any case, make sure to also remove: advanced-cache.php, db.php, w3tc/, w3-total-cache-config.php from wp-content/ in addition to wp-content/plugins/w3-total-cache/.
And if you have a staging server with the exact same configuration I would be curious to find out what the conflict is.
