variable text shows before animation

Additional info:

I reverted the text boxes to just plain text (not using the built-in Slide title variable), and yet I now see that ALL of my text boxes in my entire project show "Slide Title in Menu" variable when I roll over the fields. This is true for existing "plain" text boxes, new text boxes, copied and paste-as-plain-text text boxes... Every text field in my project now say "Slide Title in Menu" when I roll over the field. 

I'm trying to figure out how to isolate to see if this is somehow causing the animation issue described above, but I cannot put a plain text field in my project. All means of adding text to a slide results in a text field that says "Slide Title in Menu".

See image above (I have moused over a plain text field with the text "Fred". When I roll over the field, I get the popup that says "Slide Title in Menu", even though I have not assigned that project variable to the field.