Pre-transform Corruption?

[deecue]

i don't even know what section to put this under.. times like this i wish there's a pissed off and completely annoyed forum but here it goes..

i was doing some animation.. nothing too intense.. same stuff i've been doing for weeks now.. the viewport locked up and was just becoming finicky. which im used to happening on occasion with windows..nothing to worry about.. just save and restart.. it save's succesfully and i go to close down houdini to relauch.. it hits an error during close and save's a temp file to my temp. this isn't odd to me as it usually does this when this happens.

i go to reload the saved file and the first odd thing i notice is that everything's shiny because somehow my viewport display option of 'specular highlights' got checked on without me touching a thing. go turn that off and get back to work to notice the second, much bigger, problem.. one of the animated objects is just completely off in space from where it was supposed to be.. still retained the animation but it was off in the middle of no where and much smaller than before.. i go through everything double-checking and nothing's changed.. i open the saved temp file from the crash. same problem. i open up a saved backup from an hour before, and that has the freaking same problem.. (how the hell the backup save got screwed up is still a damn mystery..)

so after some thinking i remembered the object had a pre-transform on it from before. so i use a pre-transform chop on the object and reexport back to it.. ok works. but oddly only for some of the animation.. i don't want a chop sitting there during the rest of the animation for no good reason so i try using the objextractpretransform function to see if that fixes it.. well yes but no cause that's only for the current time which doesn't really help my animated object.. so i try and reset it with the objresetpretransform.. bingo fixes it.. sort of.. if you can imagine frames 1-50 it only seemed to be right on the money from 10-40. turns out the pivot wasn't right for some reason which was causing a problem for 1-10.. so i try to adjust a single key of the pivot.. i screwed up so i hit undo.. but wait.. what is this? the pivot goes back to where it was 5 seconds ago but all the sudden everything works? aww man i wanted to hit something so bad it's not even funny..

so yea.. this was an hours worth of excruciating pain and anger.. but i wanted to share and exhale.. [so bitter]

anyone want to even begin explaining to me what the hell *that* was all about?