I am using the EXNEWS theme, since it's exactly what I was looking for style wise. I'm trying to change some wording... WFCHANNEL to WIN CHANNELS and EXNEWS at the bottom to my site name, and it won't UPDATE!

I opened exnews/theme.html up in dreamweaver, made my minor changes, and reloaded it. It still had the old wording. I went into my filemanager in cpanel and opened up theme.html there, and it had the changes I had made. But if I view source on the site, it still has the OLD WORDING. Where is it pulling this from?

I did find an exnews^theme.html in templates_c, but I couldn't make any changes in there.

And yes, I've reloaded in IE and cleared my Temp internet files.

Can someone help the poor newbie?

when making changes to themes, you need to enable "Update module template .html files from themes/your theme/templates directory?" in System -> Preferences, this ensures that any changes to html files in your theme are updated automatically in the site.

After the fact, you can get around this issue by clearing out the /templates_c directory, which is where smarty caches its templates. It is safe to remove every file in there, or just the ones for your theme.