Hi,
Thank you for responding, I appreciate it.
In preparing to respond to you, I figured it out. The issue arises if one of the sorted children in the template is a linked item. (E.g., if in the previous example, there was a fourth list item called "Shirt is the fourth thing I put on", but instead of being a standalone item, it was linked to an item outside the templates folder.)
I see that the "Link Here" option is disabled in the right-click menu, when dragging-and-dropping an item to the templates folder. I work around this by first creating the linked item elsewhere, and then moving it to the templates folder.
Linked items are somewhat useful in templates, because the "to-do list" template I described previously includes UR items elsewhere in my database. E.g., one of the items might be to review a folder (UR item) of documents, so putting a link in the template task list was a convenient way to navigate to it while performing the checklist.
However, now that I know that I can preserve the children sort order by simply refraining from including linked items in the ordered list, that's easy to do (by creating a simple, non-linked item in the sorted list, and giving it a child linked item or item details hyperlink to the target).
If you consider it a bug that linked items in templates "breaks" tree order, then I'd be interested in that functionality. OTOH, the fact that UR disallows linking items to the template folder by design tells me that this isn't really a bug, but rather a consequence of my little "hack" of getting linked items into the templates folder.
Given all this, I've got a good alternative solutions and this behavior is not stopping me, so please consider my request withdrawn. I know your time is valuable and I really appreciate your responsiveness to my recent questions, and this is definitely not worth burning "political capital" on!
Thanks again, and best regards,
Aaron