@krisidious said:

be interested to know what caused that. could you upload that group? do you still have it? it may be in an autosave file.

Sure, since it was a simple object to redraw and replace, I decided to export the drawing I needed and closed without saving. So I could investigate it further. I've saved a new file with just this component, tried exporting various views and ran into the same issues, everything went smoothly, exporting in just a second, except the same view. I've attached it, you can see the two scenes...on the fixed scene, after you just delete the group of hex bolt heads and export, it goes fine.

SensusRegulator.skp

Thanks for that additional info, rabbit. Very encouraging. Knowing my AutoCAD experience will carry over somewhat is nice to hear.

I put together a little presentation, a render, some 2D drawings as I would've produced in AutoCAD, and exported a 3D PDF page where you can see the model and spin it around right there in the PDF and sent that off to my boss. I'll see what he thinks and if he's into it, I'll definitely be looking more into Rhino.