Just to clear things up I wasn't randomly disconnecting neutrals. As I said earlier I was swapping breakers around. The person that originaly made up the panel placed the wrong circuit on an AFCI breaker. So I was simply going to swap the two breakers. I turned off the two breakers to be switched but the thing that I didn't account for was that the same person that made the mistake in the first place also connected the wrong
neut. to the AFCI breaker. It was connected to a bkr other than the two I had been swapping that was energized.
Also the staple and my questions I understand now are probably unrelated and I thank you guys for clearing the fog in my brain. It was hard for me to clearly think about what was really going on because I was convinced it was all related.
