Simply Maya User Community - 'to edge loop' --- not selecting edges

Hi,
I made a polygonal object by creating a polygon cube. I extruded, duplicated, rotated, combined and merged edges to get the pictured polygon object. For the next step I was supposed to select an edge loop and bevel it. The problem was that my edge loop did not look like it was supposed to – it did not contain the same number of edges as the one pictured in the tutorial. So after playing around with it I found that some of the vertices did not behave properly. You can see in the first picture that after moving the vertex another vertex was left behind that should not be there. So I thought this would be a good time to clean my ngons as was mentioned in a previous thread. Notice in the second image that after cleaning the object, with the settings shown in the image, the vertex started to behave properly. In fact I checked all the vertices and they all behave as expected. Now the problem is that I need to bevel the edge loop shown in the third image but when I use the 'edge loop utilities>to edge loop' I get the loop shown in the fourth image. If I manually select the edges Maya returns an error 'Encountered a non-manifold vertex' Cannot Bevel'. So what is wrong with this polygonal object? Why doesn't the 'to edge loop' select the correct edges and why won't the edges bevel?

Thanks for taking a look,
Ron