I would do a shutdown from settings and pull power for 10+ seconds. All the messing around may have locked up the radio. Then once rebooted check the Settings > Zwave details page and look for a Firmware Update button, if you have that button do the zwave firmware update as this will help greatly. This is still applicable although 7.18 is now the newest: C7 2.3.1 and Z-Wave Firmware 7.17.1
When you the exclusion it should say something along the lines of "Unknown device excluded" and the device should exit exclusion mode (usually LED stops blinking). If even that is not working I would suspect either zwave is crashed or there is a problem with the device.
