Thanks for the help, folks. By the time I got to try the suggestions though, they weren't much use. Seems all my resets and reverts had messed things up beyond recall. All the suggested commands just errored out. Next time I need to do something similar, I'll try them *first*! In the end I just checked out the previous branch that this was cloned from, force-deleted the screwed one and recreated it, and restored my editing from the backup. I now have a clean commit and patch. Thanks for the link, Ryan. I have done some reading up before, but it's very easy to get that drowning feeling... I usually prefer to "learn by doing", but here it was more like "undoing"! (:-/) Loon's suggestion of an experimental branch is probably a good one. Thanks, -- Pete --