I’ve posted this to Lafayette’s Moodle Support forum, but figured I’d note it here as well: there’s a bug with Moodle that keeps it from staying in edit mode whenever you update or edit the page (e.g. adding a resource, updating an existing resource, etc.).
I’m not sure what’s causing it, but I’ll be delving deep into the code today to track it down. If you haven’t joined Lafayette’s Moodle Support course, you should consider it — I post all our bugs there, as well as updates about what problems have been fixed and are still outstanding.
Update
This bug was being caused by a segfault generated by SimplePie RSS. We use SimplePie RSS instead of Magpie RSS to parse feeds in Moodle; Magpie hasn’t been updated in forever, whereas SimplePie is being actively maintained.
Unfortunately, SimplePie is throwing a segfault under PHP 5.1.2 (though oddly, not 5.1.6). This segfault causes the page to stop loading, which in turn prevents the editing interface to stop loading when you return to the page. It’s odd that it doesn’t stop it when you first turn editing on, but I haven’t had time to debug all of the whys here.