Another Railing bug? 288,658 Polygons!

[R Muller]

My model has 4 railings, which make a very simple site fence that follows (but is not linked to) site terrain. These railings have crashed my model numerous times, with error messages etc.

Today I was checking PolyCount for another issue, and was surprised to notice that this simple rail has 288,658 polygons! This is more than half the polygons in the entire model. Not only that, the four rails are listed as 3,963 objects. I know this because I copied the rail into a new model that has nothing else in it.

Maybe the PolyCount add-on doesn't know how to count railings? Or maybe this is why these railings are crashing my model? The new blank model with nothing but the four railings now has the spinning beach ball...

There are also strange artifacts that look like miscellaneous pieces of wood trim that sometimes show up in 3D at the intersections of the rails. They are invisible in edit mode, so I don't know what to do about them.