Booked/Ordered Products Not Changing

[rjh0615]

Hi there.  I'm using VM 2.0.26d on Joomla! 2.5.14 and am having an issue with my inventory.  It seems that Virtuemart is not adding items to "booked, ordered" as it should.  It's causing a fair amount of confusion here, and has also caused us to backorder one or our products (resulting in a few unhappy customers, and even some cancelled orders).  This was not happening when we launched our site on November 1, and only seems to be an issue recently.  Unfortunately, I can't pinpoint an exact date/time it started happening. 

Here are my settings:

Virtuemart > Configuration > Order Statuses

COM_VIRTUEMART_ORDER_STATUS_SHIPPED (Shipped) - is removed - Published
COM_VIRTUEMART_ORDER_STATUS_REFUNDED (Refunded) - Is available - Published
COM_VIRTUEMART_ORDER_STATUS_CANCELLED (Cancelled) - Is available - Published
COM_VIRTUEMART_ORDER_STATUS_CONFIRMED (Confirmed) - is removed - Published
COM_VIRTUEMART_ORDER_STATUS_CONFIRMED_BY_SHOPPER (Confirmed by shopper) - is removed - Published
COM_VIRTUEMART_ORDER_STATUS_PENDING (Pending) - Is reserved - Published

We had an issue once where an item wasn't pulled out of stock until the order was marked shipped (thus backordering the item), which is why it's set the way it is.  I thought that would fix the problem, and it did, but now suddenly booked/ordered products isn't registering when an order is placed (or shipped for that matter) at all.

So I'm wondering... Our system is not tied directly to Virtuemart, aside from Authorize.net, so the inventory management on the web is manual.  If I reset the booked/ordered products each time I add inventory, will it mess anything up with orders that have already been confirmed/shipped?

Also, it seems the booked/ordered products counts towards inventory, which means that if I have the product "in stock" number set at 10, but have 7 booked/ordered of the same product, I really only have 3 items available for purchase.  Is this actually the case, and if so, is there a reason for it?  If it's not the case, what could be the reason for it to be calculating like this?  As you can imagine, it's causing confusion and quite a bit of time-wasting, because I currently have to monitor orders, manually change the booked/ordered number, and then (when I get new stock numbers on products) add the new stock number to the current stock number, then add that to the booked/ordered number, and then update my stock.  Quite tedious, and website inventory management isn't the only thing I'm here to do.   

I would really prefer not to go into the code and make any changes, if at all possible.

Thanks for the help!