That is strange, I am in the process of re-designing one of my sites and am doing it all in one folder off the root. I blocked robots from that folder and none of the new pages are in the index. Also, when I begin a new review, I usually include that page in the robots.txt as Disallow and it never gets crawled.
Did you have a mis-spelling in robots.txt?
I am sure that the Disallow: /xx.xxx works as I forgot to delete one page from the list and included it in the xml map and it generated an error as being blocked.
I list it as "Disallow: /newpagetitle.html" or for the folder "Disallow: /folder"
Maybe you can do a page removal request in Webmaster tools to get them off the index sooner.
--
"If you shoot for the stars and hit the moon, it's OK. But you've got to shoot for something. A lot of people don't even shoot." - Confucius