There is a bug in Joomla 1.6.  The featured articles are defaulting to sort by ‘Modify Date’ even though ‘publish date’ is selected.   So everytime you edit a featured article that you published earlier on, it will now jump to the second position of your frontpage article list.

For example:  If you have these articles on your Joomla frontpage:

• Article 1: Position 1
• Article 2: Position 2
• Article 3: Position 3
• Article 4: Position 4

And you edit Article 4: position 4, it will move up to the second position – based on that you have only 1 leading article.  (If you have 2 leading articles it will show up on the 3rd position)

• Article 1: Position 1
• Article 4: Position 2
• Article 2: Position 3
• Article 3: Position 4

I just searched and there was a defect ticket created for this issue which you can find in the Joomlacode tracker.  This issue has since been fixed and you can apply a patch to your Joomla 1.6 installation and this issue will be resolved.    featured articles will not reorder after you edit them.  Newly featured articles are ordered first and order is not changed for existing articles already on the frontpage.  You can find the patch at the bottom of this page – click here.