**Bug introduced between 10.0 and 10.2 and persists through 11.0.0** > Thank you for taking the time to send in this report. It does appear that pattern-variable renaming misses symbols within Except when using With. I will forward an incident report to our developers regarding this issue, and include the discussion in the stack exchange article. --- With[{u = {f}}, HoldPattern[G[f_, Except[f_]]] :> u ] gives > `HoldPattern[G[f$_, Except[f_]]] :> {f}` I would expect > `HoldPattern[G[f$_, Except[f$_]]] :> {f}` Bug?