Thanks for the reply. I understand about types of patterns and redefining. In wildfire I do not know how to select the pattern options from the redefine menu. In Wildfire a pattern is more like a feature in itself, so when a feature fails the redefine menu allows you to redefine the feature itself, but not the pattern (that I can see). The solution would seem to be to just go to the feature tree and redefine the pattern from there but I cannot do this until I suppress my way out of the redefine feature menu in which case that feature is now suppressed and no longer appears in the tree. I can't get there from here!
Does this make sense?