I had trouble with combining holes on the snowman. The supposed hole was still being filled, although with a different fill pattern. I took a page from the fleur-de-lis video and cleaned up duplicate points on the outline of the hole, When I thought that was fixed, I clicked "close shape". Voila, a beautiful hole!
Just to clarify the issue for myself, I re-did the process, but skipped deleting the duplicate points. As it turns out, it was the shape that was the problem. Even with all of those extra points, it wasn't closed. Just closing the shape fixed the combined holes.
