my articles publish even when I deselect publish I'm an admin user type with publisher priveges as well. When I save an article, it is always save as "published". Even when I uncheck "published" under "publishing options" it saves as published. 

In other words, I make sure "published" is deselected, and when I save and edit the article, the "published" select box is ticked.

My goal here is to save the content as unpublished, but I can't even when manually deselecting "published".

Drupal version 6.30. Fresh install. No whacky modules added.
This is what I did to fix the problem: 


I disabled all except the core modules. 
I then tested to see if I could unpublish content, and I could. 
I then re-enabled each module until I found the culprit. In this case, it was the "rules" module.