thanks for the information. very good. i did, however, discover a MUCH simpler fix... or sorts, still using NVEdit, i noticed that my mod had a ton of armor in the file that i never modified, but did look at. i thought this may be some kind of 'oops! he touched it, better save it' kind of situation. i thought to myself 'there's no way i'm going to reset the flag on ALL of these items... especially since the Master File all had them properly set. this got me thinking... anyway. i boldly selected everything that wasn't a part of my mods, scipts, &c. and them selected 'Remove' from the rightclickmenu (the one near the bottom of the list). i switched the flag for my mod and exited, saving the file as i did. it saved easily. then i kicked up the game & PRESTO!! the result was that ALL headgear was now behaving properly and the mod file itself was smaller... which is always good. thanks for the help. the thread you pointed me to is great, but an utterly stupid thread title... tells us nothing (drives me nuts when people do that). no wonder i didn't find it... WR! :woot: