farbtoph,

Glad you got your problem sorted out

Just thought I'd pop in along the side and throw in a suggestion; sometimes out-of-the-box thinking is overlooked

If you happen to like the particular shape that you create from applying a deformer (not the flatness; the overall direction/wonky shape), and would like to re-create it rather easily, you could start out like you did, by deforming a torus, and then create a curve using point-snapping points to it; now you have a curve that is the shape you made with your deformer. From here, just give the geometry the axe and now do the extrude thing (above posts).

Happy deforming ^_^