I chose to take the state & local tax deduction per your recommendations for $1767. It keeps defulting to the sales tax of $577. How do I fix this?

Try going through the Sales Tax option one more time.  At the end of that section the program will show you the best choice you can choose to change to the other option if you wish.  That might reset it to the state and local tax choice instead of sales tax.

I did this several times. It did not change. I gave up after 7 or 8 tries..I filed w/ the sales tax because it would not change. I tried exiting the program w/o saving,.went back in, same result. I gave up.