I wrote a program to automatically update PCB refdes and back annotate to the schematic

Sorry. I just came back to say I made a mistake. My own error & inexperience with KiCad. I figured it out and found a bug: of course when I made my own hierarchical design I didn’t test it for bottom modules even though I made some changes to that part of the code to “clean it up”.

By the way: that is a sweet looking board. I visited Al Hambra once.

Ah - you have modules with refdeses of the form via**

I had not encountered that before. Good thing I tried your files!

Andy:
I made a new post about the updated software because this one was hijacked.

Brian