Hi Bob, thanks a lot for the input! After messing with it for awhile and now reading this, I believe it's coming together in my mind. When I was saving a layout as a template, I unchecked the radio button beside "unlink external references", thinking that it was necessary to do this since it then places a copy of the referenced plan in "common documents". Then I created a new project and selected the proper plan and layout templates. After that I went into the layout and re-linked the layout to the new .plan file that is in the .caproj file that they share, rather than the one that it was linked to in common documents.
What I'm saying is that I think I added an unnecessary step by unchecking the "unlink external references" button, when I could have simply made sure I chose the correct .plan and .layout templates when I create a new .caproj file. Is this correct? Thank you again! -Tucker