Unfortunately it started out as an edit poly object, it was originally part of the other object being used as a surface and that one section wouldn't generate, so that's when I detached and tried to reset, at one point converted to mesh to see if it worked any better. Noted that poly is preferred, but I don't think that's going to solve this one.
Edit: New screen recording attached. One forest pro object, one edit poly surface. All I do is select and deselect. The forest object goes between three different states as the selection toggles, sometimes it all generates, sometimes one column generates, sometimes nothing on the foreground element but still on the background element (same surface object.) My next attempt will be unchecking the 'auto' button in the surface rollout and see if i can get it to stick how i want, or maybe once it generates how i want i can convert it to custom to 'save'. Note the random generation also changes if I just continually hit the refresh button on surface rollout.
Edit2: Unchecking 'auto' didn't fix it, it still regenerated on the farm and got different results than what I had when I submitted (backburner rendering). I just refreshed until everything was there, then converted to custom instead of generate mode. All rendered as needed.