I'm trying to make a patch and have run into the 'bad vertex' error. It's come up a few times on the listserv, but I never saw a public resolution. One possible source of errors is that I had to do a manual correction in FreeView, including a 'remove intersections' in FreeView. However, tksurfer had no trouble mapping the curvature to the finished surface, so I assume this was not likely to be the source of the error. Details below:

$    mris_flatten -w 0 -distances 20 7 lh.cort.patch.3d lh.cort.patch.flat
using write iterations = 0
sampling 7 neighbors out to a distance of 20 mm
reading patch lh.cort.patch.3d with 1919246708 vertices (2846533.5% of total)
MRISreadPatch: bad vertex # (1701060705) found in patch file
No such file or directory