Symbols disapear if I do nearly anything

[Capsey Randell]

I am currently trying to break apart some art work inside a template into pannels to print for a vehicle wrap. The art work utilized the symbol sprayer tool and everytime I try to copy or move the artwork the symbols disapear and wont come back until I restart the program without saving. I eventually figured out if I avoid copying or moving the file I can create my panel clipping mask in place and I can still see the symbols, but when I save the pannel and open it as a PDF the symbols disapear in the PDF. I am mildly panicking as I need this printed 3 hours ago. Any help would be much appreciated.

[Capsey Randell]

After some more googleing I have updated my drivers and even opened Illustrator from Geforce Experiance after rebooting which did nothing. I have also tried from an older version of illustrator  which also did nothing. This is incredibly frustrating. is there a way to contact adobe directly. This has now eaten 4 hours of my day which has put my design costs through the roof on this project.

[Capsey Randell]

I have now tried it on a seperate computer to no avail. Is there a setting I am missing that will make this work?

[kevin stohlmeyer]

Have you tried to expand the symbols into separate shapes first?

If someone went ga ga with the symbol sprayer it's very possible that the file size/memory usage is huge.

[Capsey Randell]

How do you expand the symbols into seperate shapes?

[Monika Gause]

Select those symbol instances and then Object > Expand.

[Capsey Randell]

when I do this all my symbols turn to little + marks and the symbols themselves disapear.

[Ton Frederiks]

Can you check in the Symbols panel > Symbol Options... and see if the symbol is Static or Dynamic?

If Dynamic, try if changing to Static helps. Static symbols require less file space.

[Capsey Randell]

Every adjustment I do to the symbol settings makes them disapear.