In regard to the merge issue, I wonder if it's related to an issue I have had in the last few weeks. I recently had a sync issue when I tried to sync my FTM tree with the linked tree on Ancestry. I had not had this issue since upgrading to the latest version of FTM, but then it reared it's ugly head again. And that error happened after I merged one individual and then tried to sync the trees. Perhaps the merge issue is creating a host of issues?