Started a new project in Elements, using up to 1.4.0 (23889), could publish dozens of times and try lot’s of new things in the North Eleven template. Yeah.
Then all of sudden Publishing got confused, it tried to reset the SFTP sessions, etc., but no luck and I had to Quit Elements and restart before I could Publish again.
I play around with the various options and seem to have narrowed it down to “BackUp frequency”. If I set that to “Every time I publish”, I can only hit Publish like once or twice.
Took me a while to find as I had it set to week/day in the beginning :->
After I turned “backup” OFF, all is good -so far- and I have since published (with all other setting remaining the same) dozens of times again 
Hope this helps when somebody else runs into this …