A prim went phantom on me

I'm not what anyone would call an expert builder but I can build a house. What happened to me last evening (actually I got a little of it night before last) was one of my prims that I made for the floor of a three room house I'm building on my 512 lot became phantom after I linked the whole thing together to prepare to quit for the evening and start again the next day (that was the night before last). At first I didn't think much about it since there were about 25000 residents logged in and strange things happen when that many people play in SL. Last night it was still the same........just one of 55 prims linked together. I know it was linked because I unlocked and raised the linkset above the ground and it moved with it (thought you could not link phantom and non phantom prims in the same linkset!!). I live right at the edge or two regions..........I mean the property next my me is in another region. The other three sides are Linden protected land....I'm locked in so to speak LOL. I thought that maybe being so close to the boundary was my problem so I moved the house away from the other region as far as I could without getting on Linden land.............about 3 meters. No help. So I called "Live Help" and Lexxie Linden answered (after an hour.........LOL) and it got her stumped too after we tried several things to fix it. She told me that I cannot delete a prim if it's linked even with "edit linked prims" checked..............I didn't know that. But her suggestion (which worked, by the way) was to unlink the whole set and copy the prim move it out of the way and then delete the bad prim and move the copy back in place. Pain in the butt if you ask me but it worked

Now my question.......has this happened to anyone here? And if it did, how did you fix it? Is unlinking everything and deleting it the only way? I know some of you guys might have some answers...........looking forward to hearing them. Thank you in advance.

PS...........since I rag on SL and LL so much about customer service lately I really have to do a "turn about's fair" play thing. Lexxie Linden was great, sympathic to my really minor problem, offered everything she knew (I think she actually asked someone else to give her some more ideas due to the long lapses in the IM's), and in the end she came up with the solution. So................WELL DONE LEXXIE AND LINDEN LABS!!!

Hahahahaha........if you've ever read some of my rants about customer service, I bet you would never have guessed you would see me say that. But, it's only fair I included that compliment.

That happens sometimes, solution is to delete the effected prim, and remake it. I've seen it happen a few times, sometimes prims just go weird for some reason. Replacing is the best answer.

Known bug. The usual cause is that the floor prim that went phantom is ever so slightly overlapping with another floor prim that is in the same plane with it. There is no problem with overlapping with something like a wall, that is at a different surface angle. But if the surfaces are in the same plane (exact same Z value), and they overlap, it screws up sometimes and decides one has to become phantom.

Two solutions:

1: Slightly re-size the bad prim, to move the overlapping edges apart. Look VERY closely at each of the four edges. If you see any 'flicker' as it shifts between two surface representations, or if highlighting the bad prim and the one right next to it shows any overlap, then that is the edge to slightly adjust. Unlink the bad prim, tweak it, and when you can walk on it again, re-link it. Be aware also that sometimes the prim will have 'mushy edges'. Meaning you can stand in the middle, but not right at the edge. If that happens, you still have a very tiny overlap...

2: Sometimes you do need to re-create the prim. Unlink it, then shift drag to leave a copy in its place. Delete the original, which remains highlighted. Then test the copy, and re-link.