SharePoint Feature Scope Changes Ignored

The Problem

I ran into a situation where I had deployed a broadly scoped feature and then narrowed the feature scope down, but the feature was acting like it still had the original scope settings. The feature was a delegate control to deploy JQuery using the AdditionalPageHead delegate control, just like Jan Tielens described here. When I had the feature scoped to the site collection (Scope="Site"), it was auto-deploying across the site collection as expected. But then when I tightened the scope down to specific websites (Scope="Web") and added a Scope="false" to make it require manual activation, it was behaving as if the it was still scoped at the site collection and was still auto-deploying. This continued even when I completely deleted the solution.

The Fix

After completely deleting the solution, I updated the solution and feature with new GUIDs. Thereafter, it behaved as expected. It seemed to behave like some remenant of the solution wasn't fully removed by from the solution store even though the solution was deleted. Here's a related forum posting on the issue. If it was something I did wrong, then I doubt changing the feature and solution GUIDs would have fixed it--that's my story anyway.

I'll also mention that I tried developing this with VSeWSS 1.3 but was frustrated by it always creating an assembly (even for the "empty" project template) which couldn't be removed without breaking things. I fell back to STSDEV which is remains my tool of choice.