I’ve just had near enough the exact same problem and I’m in the middle of fixing it.
In my case it’s an inability to use the slug ‘events’ as any attempt redirects to an archive page with all archive results for events, for which I have a custom post type in fact.
I’ve tried using a custom events page, I’ve tried using an events template applied to a normal wordpress page and only the permalink that I don’t want to use will work.
I’ve had this issue before with other slug names and I believe that ‘events’ is a slug reserved either by WordPress or by a plugin and therefore the only way I could fix it was to change the slug to ‘our-events’ and then set up a redirect for anyone for anyone trying to use the url with /events or /events.php
I hope this helps?
If you’ve already found a solution that’s different then maybe you could share it with me as I’d be interested to find out alternative solutions to this?
Thanks – Rob