IPostBackHandler and EnableViewState

I've spent several hours troubleshooting a crazy bug, which is explained in detail here. In a nutshell, the changed state of toolbar buttons (ASP.Net LinkButton controls) was not being kept. Every time a partial postback occurred on the web page, the changes would disappear.

I did much research and learned that the IPostBackHandler mechanism is what was responsible for restoring the control values after each postback. For some reason it didn't appear to be working. I even built a small test project but it did work in that!

Suddenly I noticed that the test page in my main project had EnableViewState=false. I changed it to true and ... everything worked fine!

My findings seem to conflict with several articles, including this one. All I know is that in my case EnableViewState must be set to true.

I'm posting this, both as a future reminder to myself and in the hopes that a State Management guru will read it and explain to me what's really going on.