I have a sorted list I'm working with that may contain elements added and deleted by another script through jquery, and I have a weird problem. These newly created elements appear to be dragging, but they actually don't sort if I don't have them already when the page loads. I tried using sortable ('refresh'), but it seems to have no effect.
To give you the opportunity to close this question and just for reference, if someone else stumbles about it, this seems to work fine in the latest jquery-ui. Here is jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/fordlover49/mVrGA/
I had a similar problem. As soon as I added a new item to the sort list, nothing else was dragged. My solution was to call the method destroy:
destroy
$( ".selector" ).sortable( "destroy" );
and then sort again.