Magento – How to remove a block with local.xml

Erfan is right that the html is outputted twice, once as a child of 'checkout.onepage.login' and once as a child of 'checkout.onepage.billing'

Thus there are two child blocks with the same name. Each can have a different template, and each gets rendered as a child of the parent.

To change the persistent block in either of the parent blocks, you need to target the parent block directly such as:

<checkout_onepage_index>
    <reference name="checkout.onepage.login">
            <block type="persistent/form_remember" name="persistent.remember.me" template="my/custom/template.phtml" />
        </reference>
</checkout_onepage_index>

The above will only change the template in the login block.

If you only target the child block 'persistent.remember.me' then magento seems to only change the occurrence of the first found block. Start Speculation: This is most likely in order or alpha occurrence , with 'checkout.onepage.billing' appearing alphabetically before 'checkout.onepage.login', in whatever array is used to store the block internally. The fact that .billing is rendered after .login just makes it look like it is only changing the second occurrence. :) End Speculation

Some basic steps to go through

• Check that caching and the compiler are turned of
• Double check if the file exists and you got the path right (might be a small typo, who knows)
• replace the type with core/template, if there's an issue with your block class this will prevent the template from showing up
• Make sure the parent block is the right file, turn on template path hints to check this.

One of the above should turn up something useful nine out of ten times.