<i>why do you put them in a shift register?"</i><p> Also, at the time, I didn't realize that Occurrences were special, in that a given instance of the GENERATE OCCURRENCE function will always refer to the same occurrence, even if it's been called before. In otherwords, the function that generated them didn't NEED to store them.
For this reason, you can't make an array of refnums by using GENERATE OCCURRENCE inside a loop - the array of refnums will all refer to the same occurrence.