makes you feel like a right pain dont it goatfish, bein a 'noob'. To let you know I've been having the same problems with manipulator handles not going anywhere. I was working through the basic human form tut too, and it got to the point where every time I created a new isoparm, i had to save my work, exit, and reopen. Then one lesson which i've known I had to do for a while and got round to getting to grips with yesterday, was cleaning up geometry for smooth edge flow and booleans. It wasnt pretty but my basic geometry wasnt great to begin with, but i was kind of pleased with what id done. Saved it, and when I reopened later on, it had all disappeared, an hours worth of merging verts and splitting polygons, gone. I use maya 8.5 PLE, which I've started to wonder wether thats the problem. Has anyone experienced or heard of maya PLE giving problems?