I'm not sure I'm understanding your answer. But, I think that the problem might be coming from the fact that, in OpenERP/Odoo you have the information of the products divided in two tables (for some reason beyond the scope of your question): product_template and product_product. Check the two of them. Probably you are changing the product template's name and not the product's (per se) name or viceversa.

For what I know, product_template is about the page view of the product and about the product itself, without its variants. And product_product is about variants of the product, which is at least one, the product itself. You can see that at product_template is the virtual mother object of product_product children... But the problem for me comes with the front-office. On my product page, I can not save change I made in the product_template website_description. The save function of the editor doesn't save anything. And If I try to change directly on the database, it's save, but these differences are not showing up on the front-end page! I'm wondering more and more if Odoo is not storing some kind of data elsewhere...