I am trying to do an animation and if I try to rotate my model all the bits turn on there own axis. I am trying to overcome this by combining all the bits, but when I try to combine very occasionally it works but most of the time the cursor just turns into an egg timer and the computer just stays like it. Two questions, 1. is combining the best way around this problem and 2. any idea why the cursor just turns into an egg timer and nothing else happens. I have left it today for eleven hours but it still has not combined and the blue line at the top of the screen is grey.

I am running a 3GB duel core machine with 2 GBs of DDR2 ram on board so I don't think it is an under powered machine causing the problem

Thanks for your time
trikeman