InDesign XML Import — Help needed in correcting layout issues

Firstly, WOW, that's some complex stuff you've got going on there. Way beyond my own little excursions with XML. It looks like you know a lot more than I do but my immediate thought about the import going wrong could be that you used an existing indd file and amended it. Or that you copied and pasted from one file to another. Was that the case?

InDesign seems to hold onto the XML information no matter how much you 'clear' it.

I had this happen a couple of weeks ago and my workaround was a lot of trial and error copying and pasting into a new blank document, importing the XML, undoing that, going back to the failed indd, clearing out the ROOT and masters, copying and pasting from the new doc and re-importing again. A big old faff but I managed to get it working again. That's probably not the exact method I used but it might help you on your way.

When you said there were extra tags coming in, again, this could be from the original document. Or is it that you're getting extra information in tagged areas that should be blank? This happens to me when I do a re-import with an updated XML. So the workaround for that is to use conditional text (Window > Type and Tables > Conditional Text). I create a new condition called Empty and in my XML fill any blank areas with something like "$E$". After XML import I then use find/replace to hunt for that text ($E$) and apply the "Empty" condition to it. Then I turn off the visibility of that condition and poof, the text is hidden.

Hopefully some of this will help. Good luck!