thanks for the very usefull responses guys. I indeed had a very big big modifier stack on my leafs: several bend and ffd3x3 modifiers etc. I will keep in mind to collapse the modifiers ! @Mark Dygert , wow man I would love to have such a script. And you made me bind shift + s =P
KABOOM... yea had that happen to me, it seems like the file went corrupt at some point and I didn't know until I reopened it. It had corrupted a few of the older files that I remember working on without an issue. Nothing I did fixed it, it just kept getting worse each time I opened it. Because of this I bound "save…