I can't manually change titles at the node level

Make sure your theme does not override page titles. For example, Acquia Marina has built in support for page titles and overrides the module's settings.

For Acquia Marina or Slate (1.x Versions only), this is in the theme configuration page. You'll need to set the page titles to 'custom' to prevent overriding the module. Not sure what theme you're using so it's hard to say if this is even the issue.

It's hard to say. At this point, I usually start disabling modules one at a time until the problem goes away. That will tell you what's causing it.

If you haven't already, I would switch the theme to a drupal core theme and check if the page titles are working. That will confirm it is, or is not, the theme.

I am experiencing this same issue. I have set the default format for the content type to [title-raw], [term-raw] | [site-name]. I have checked the box that says show field. When I edit the node I am able to enter a title into the Page Title field. However, the page continues to display the title as specified in the default settings. The page_title table does have my custom entries for the nodes. My theme is a customized version of the Andreas03 contributed theme; there is no template.php. The only things I have changed from the contributed version are images and CSS. The changes I made to page.tpl.php only involved including the feed icon and writing a different credits line. The theme sets the title tag in the head section by printing the $head_title variable. I am on Drupal 6.19 (and therefore don't need any special template.php handling) and the latest release of Page Title. I have attached a screen print that shows which modules I have enabled.

Here is a screen print of one of the nodes showing that I have a different custom title than what is showing in the title currently.

What I am seeing is that if I enter the default pattern for a content type, then the custom page title is not picked up for that content type. If I don't enter a default pattern, then the custom page title is picked up.

I'd need to see a screenshot of the settings page - sounds like you might be using [title] instead of [page-title] for the tokens.

Reading over my comment in #6, I do see that I had the tokens of [title-raw], [term-raw] | [site-name]. I can verify that using [page-title] instead fixes the problem. User error!

Hello.

I have the same problem.
reading this node help me very much.
I have changed the theme to garland, and the problem went away!

I went over my theme, Acquia Marina , and searched where am I to override the page title.
and I did not find it.

can you please explain this point ?

many thanks
Angel

This is a problem with Fusion (fusion_core)....

148   // Replace page title as Drupal core does, but strip tags from site slogan.
149   // Site name and slogan do not need to be sanitized because the permission
150   // 'administer site configuration' is required to set and should be given to
151   // trusted users only.
152   if (drupal_get_title()) {
153     $head_title = array(strip_tags(drupal_get_title()), variable_get('site_name', 'Drupal'));
154   }
155   else {
156     $head_title = array(variable_get('site_name', 'Drupal'));
157     if (variable_get('site_slogan', '')) {
158       $head_title[] = strip_tags(variable_get('site_slogan', ''));
159     }
160   }
161   $vars['head_title'] = implode(' | ', $head_title);

This is a known bug #1144188: Page Title module not working

Update the fusion theme with the latest version (6.x-1.12 or more) and the problem resolve.