Yes, early on, to make sure, I wrote a routine that counted all controls and scripts everywhere and worked until I got to zero. Unplaced groups are always hard to track down if you are not relentless.Have you checked for unplaced groups and non-visible objects?
I had forgotten that one could compact a stack. A holdover from HC, I assume? Anyway, no effect. The stack file dump is unchanged. I would be interested to see how the binFile of the stack file develops as one adds controls and handlers. And whether that data changes if a control is deleted.
Interestingly, though the dump is over 2 Megs in length, a "get info" on the stack file itself only shows a size of about 75K. I guess I do not know what either of those two figures actually mean.
Craig