I had a strange occurence and I'm wondering what I overlooked. I bought a property with a house already on it, and the sale included all of the objects, and indeed, I am shown as the owner of the house. While playing around trying to move pose balls I would keep missing and instead move a piece of the house (most often the floor..this is a treehouse). After nudging it back into place several times I looked closely at the edit box and found the lock checkbox which it seemed should do what I wanted..ie...keep the floor in place. When I checked it I found that I didn't have to worry about the floor moving anymore, as it had disappeared. No, it did not turn transparent, it's just gone.
Now while this did force me to quickly learn some more complex building techniques than I had intended too quite this soon, it has also made me a bit leary about that lock function. It seems to me that in general it would be a good idea to apply to the sections of a house so that I wouldn't have to worry about shifting them out of alignment, but I like some of the design features of my house, and it doesn't seem that I have access to some of the textures used in it's construction, so I'm afraid to apply it for fear these other sections may disappear as well. Can someone tell me what I did wrong and why this happened?
Update. Never mind...I did find the object (labeled house deck) in my object folder this morning, so maybe I just clicked on the wrong thing (although I'm sure there is nothing around the lock checkbox that would cause me to "take" the item). I think my floor is a little bit better constructed anyway in terms of alignment, and with 4 fewer prims, and I certainly learned a lot.