All right - I solved my own issue - and here's the solution.
But first - how I got into this predicament (and I'm sure this used to work)

I'm shooting a documentary - about two hundred takes in one day. It's soldiers being deployed to Afghanistan.

I assemble them all onto one time line - one pic trk, one audio trk
Every take in order that they were shot.

I call this Deployment ASSEMBLY ALL - it will remain a "virgin" edit - never to be manipulated in any way.

I immediately copy this edit and call it Deployment - categories
That's because I want to sort them out into categories -
Speakers, Audience, "the General", "the Governor", interviews, etc.

So I made a bunch of additional video tracks with those labels and dragged the associated video to where they belonged, i.e. All shots of the General goes on his track, all Audience on it's track, etc.

I end up with about 10 tracks with the weird spacing you would assume.

I have done this before, and at this point I would begin to drag the video clips together on each track eliminating the space and rippling out the voids by clicking F. This time it didn't work (again, I'm sure I've done this before). Anyway, when I would manual ripple "the General" everything would move (like I rippled CTRL SHIFT F)
Now it's an hour later (and a desperate cry to the forum, as well) and I've figured out the solution (but it sucks).

In the old days, I'd let the audio pile up in any old way and it all seemed to all work.

In order to finish this part of the project NOW - I've got to put the associated AUDIO on it's own track as well - that is, the General Video, now needs General Audio in order to F Ripple correctly without bothering the other tracks.

It's a job with a deadline, so that's what I'm doing.

Any other suggestions??

:>))

MORE -
OK - I refined my last situation even more.

I picked the GROUP SELECTION tool and dragged everything on the Generals track to the far right - beyond the original edit.
I then tighted up the General by dragging the clips together and using the good ol' F Key to eliminate the spaces.

It's working and it's fast.

But meanwhile I've uncovered another mystery - might be the computer - might be Ver 11.
For some reason it seems like my CTRL key is sort of permanently activated. That would explain my other issues.
I found that because if I click the D key to change selection modes (without pressing CTRL - it works anyway)
I don't have time right now to figure it all out but it's probably a keyboard issue - or maybe not.
Hey - wading through poop like this - and getting the job done on time - it what separates the men from the boys (and girls).

v

I need to do some more testing on Vegas 11, so I'll try to duplicate your problem in the next few days.

In the meantime ...

I often use a workflow similar to yours, where I put everything on one timeline, and then move events onto other timelines in order to organize things into categories. However, when it comes time to getting rid of spaces, I use a script to get rid of all the spaces: one click, and I'm done.

I have many scripts for this, including the one included in Excalibur (great add-on for Vegas). I'd be happy to send my free scripts to you.

The one I use most often is one I created for someone in these forums many years ago. That person wanted to remove gaps, but only on tracks for which he had added names. I have actually found this very useful because I always name the tracks according to the content I am placing there (in your case, "Speakers, Audience, "the General", "the Governor", interviews, etc."). Any track that is unnamed is not changed.

You might find these threads useful (one contains the script I just mentioned):

How to close gaps between many clips on timeline?

How to quickly rearrange clip order

My Workflow for Large Project

Thanks John -
I'm about three hours into the edit and as described in another post "Possible Bug" - my issue continues.

For some reason the CTRL button is activated on the (F) RIPPLE command as well as on the (D) Select cursor command.

I thought it was a hardware issue, but I'm NOT affected on the CTRL Z or a few others.

Still searching, but it's getting to be a pain again - (imagine editing w/o a ripple?? Arghhh...

I have a "F Lock" key on my Microsoft keyboard. If that gets pressed, many of the keys behave differently. Perhaps you have something similar on your keyboard?

Another idea would be to look at the keyboard mapping within Vegas itself. I'm not aware of any way you can "lock" a shift key (shift, ctrl, alt), but perhaps there is, and that is what has happened.

Finally, I re-boot my computer many times a day (old habits) but I am surprised to find that many people leave their computer turned on 24/7, and often don't re-boot for weeks at a time. Therefore, if you are one of those, and you haven't re-booted for a long time, now would be a good time to do that. This is the sort of thing that, if something has gotten "poked" down at the O/S level, re-booting will reset it.