I pressed alt-x before as I indeed use that very often during modeling however the problem still persisted when I last posted. NOW however I reloaded max after a reboot and loaded the scene file, began extruding edges from my existing object and theyre now the same colour as the rest of the object! (as it should be)
Very confusing, i'm not quite sure what happened there but at least i'm a bit more educated on possible reasons why this may happen in the future due to material ID's and multi/sub-obj materials, thanks for the help
