Items still publised after removing them

We're having an issue with items still being visible and ordered after they've been marked as not published.  First we disabled the customer role that had access to the category, didn't work.  We then marked the category as unpublished, didn't work.  Then we unpublished a couple items for testing, didn't work.  We have not actually delete the items yet, because we wanted to have the ability to bring an item back, if we wanted.

The category is not showing in the side menu, but the popular items list still shows the item and it can be ordered from there.

DerralVL wrote:

Did you save your changes?, also did you refresh the web page afterwards.

Yes, the changes were saved and we have even gone back to verify the settings.  We've refreshed and also tried it on different computers in our office.  It's acting like once the item is in the Popular Tags or Best Selling Products section, the category and publishing options don't matter.  The customer can still access the item and place it in their cart from both of those sections.  We're trying to remove products without having to delete them, in case we decide to bring them back.

If you want to unpublish some product, then unpublish this product (not category).