My coupon condition I set for full price, but not special price items, is invalid.

I’m having the same problem. I went through the following steps, in order to apply my discount code to regular-priced items, and not the discounted/special priced items. And also for some categories (example: clothes, dresses), and not applicable for some categories (example: accessories).

I did the following:
Promotions > Shopping Cart Price Rules > Add New Rule.
Left hand side, at the Rule Information page, I populated these fields:
Rule Name, 
Description, 
Status – Active, 
Websites, 
Customer Groups – selected all, 
Coupon – Specific coupon,
Coupon code – i gave it a name like “Specials”.

Then on the left hand menu bar, in the Conditions page, I did the following:

Clicked on green plus sign – I selected Conditions Combination.
At the next line, clicked again on green plus sign – I selected Category.
Next to that, I chose “Is not”, then next to it, I chose the relevant categories, which are Special Price & Accessories categories.
(i.e. I meant to tell Magento that this discount should work only if the category of the product is not from the Special Price (my already discounted products) and Accessories categories).

On the left hand side menu, I clicked Actions. On this page:
Apply – Percent of product price discount,
Discount amount – 10 (for 10%).

Then I hit “Save Rule”. 
When I went to my website to test it out, i have two problems. First, Magento did not recognize the conditions I specified. So it went and applied a discount of 10% across the board for all products in the shopping cart. Even the ones in the categories of Special Price and Accessories where the discount should not apply, also ended up being discounted by 10%.

So I went and tried applied all that Conditions, this time, also in the Actions page, under the section named “Apply the rule only to cart items matching the following conditions (leave blank for all items).”

This time, when I tested it, in the shopping cart, the coupon code didn’t even work. It said “Coupon code is invalid”. So I went and erased the Conditions I had set in the Conditions page. But left he conditions in the Actions page (bottom section). 

Also, the coupon code is invalid.

I am so frustrated. Does anyone know how to fix this? I am using Magento ver. 1.4.2.0.

Thank you.

Elnie