Footnotes won't renumber indesign cs6

Question

I'm in book publishing and new to Indesign. I'm working on a mac pro, in a document created by another publisher (a 44 page chapter of a book). The Type > Document footnote options are set to renumber every section. There is one section in the document, at the first page. If I insert a footnote, the subsequent note callouts in the main text renumber, but the notes themselves don't. The newly inserted note has the correct number, but the following notes retain their numbers. Thus, if I insert a note after note 24, the new reference number will be 25; old note 25's reference number is now 26, etc.; the new footnote is also correctly numbered 25, but old footnote 25 and all following footnotes retain their old numbers. If I change the footnote options to renumber each page, the reference numbers comply, but the notes themselves retain their original numbers. I've tried cutting all the text out of the document and pasting it back in, but nothing changed. Can anyone enlighten me here?

Answer 1

I have never seen what you describe, and I've set scores of academic books and journals, many with several hundred footnotes, going back to before ID could "do" footnotes and they required a separate text box adjusted by hand (à la PageMaker).  Maybe I misunderstood, but I wonder why you need a section on the first page: sections are an aspect of pages rather than text flow, so ID allows just one per page.  Every now and again I need to change the numbering within a page, and when I do I fake one set notes so I can control the numbers.
Much more often, I need to add an un-numbered or asterisked footnote above the first note, generally the author's acknowledgments.  The workaround for this is to insert a carriage return before ftnt 1 and type the note on that new line (I often use a separate paragraph style).  ID doesn't care, apparently thinking my addition is part of the first note.  If the first page doesn't have a ftnt for me to sneak the acknowledgments into then I do it the old-fashioned way, in a separate text box at the foot of the page -- easier than messing with sections.
There are many complaints on this forum about the failings of ID's footnoting, and kind souls occasionally explain various workarounds they've come up with.  The most frustrating is ID's habit of losing footnotes when importing word files, which has become more pronounced with new versions.  Jongware became so frustrated he wrote a Javascript that converts Word end-notes (which seem to import okay, albeit as dumb text at the end) into ID footnotes.  The best single source I know of for information on notes in InDesign is Peter Kahrel's website.
Good luck,
David