Zhann, Oh no! That's exactly what I wanted to do, save the model WITH the lights. But since encountering this problem I've removed the lights from the selected objects, and I STILL can't group it, and only one primative shows in the thumbnail. ICM, I don't really care how much fiddling this entails if I can only figure out the problem and solve it, since I have come across this sort of problem once before; I saved an object I'd made, but only one primative showed in the thumbnail - and unfortunately when I went to add that creation to another file, only the primative that showed in the thumbnail arrived in the new document. I will try your suggestion.

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