I've altered the toolbar settings in the top-level (actually all) user groups, but the editing toolbar still presents as default.
How can I action my changes?
The toolbar settings come from all groups that a user is in. If a user is in 2 groups, where one group uses a reduced setting and one uses the default setting, the default setting of all buttons will be used.
Go to the linking screen of the user you are logging in as and check what groups that are in. For each group, check that none of them are using preferences that you dont want or see if they are using the default system wide preferences.
You might also want to try changing the global preferences on the system config screen to see if changes here take effect. If they do - there is probably a group that this user is in still using the global preferences.