in moving around a couple of lines of edges, I found autosmooth no longer effected the adjacent 2 rows of faces. The faces are in a somewhat irregular geometry, synchronous, but not geometric.

In attempt to address the smoothing issue, I selected the two adjacent rows of adjacent faces, clicked 'soften' button in the object operation panel. My machine froze up for a couple of minutes, a 'tip' came up about the soften operation, and my entire model was scattered as if it had exploded in a lot of interesting directions.

I shut down the program, started it again, tried it a second time, rebooted, tried it a third, same result. After which, the program locks up.

I can either assume that this is a bug, or that soften wasn't exactly intended for this purpose.