Followers Won't Equip Some Gear

[Claireah]

As the title says, Lydia, as well as a mod follower, Lilium, will not equip some of my gear I give them. I was not having this problem earlier, and I did not add any mods or take any out between the time this happened and the time before it. I haven't tested any other followers for this problem. I KNOW that the armor they have isn't better than what I'm giving them. For instance, I'm giving Lydia upgraded Nordic Heavy Armor, which gives +50 armor, and she won't equip it when she has no other armor in her inventory. I tried other body armors as well to make sure it wasn't just that one and all but one didn't work. The one she put on was a weaker piece of body armor which I can't remember the name of. She also was able to wear all other pieces of gear that I gave her for other body parts, but I only tried one piece of gear for each other body part, so maybe other armors could be bugged for other body parts as well. I should also note my character is NOT affected by this from what I can see because Ebony armor works on him, but not on lydia. I only have a few mods installed for armor and I disabled them all, as well as any follower mods and nothing was fixed. I reinstalled skyrim as well. Nothing still. What do I do?

[Claireah]

I found a fix, so I'll leave it here for anyone else who might ever need it. I don't know what's really wrong in the end. It seems any companion would only equip steel armor....nothing else. No matter how much better or worse it was. I tried NPC editor, but that didn't work because its not compatible with windows 8. That should probably work if you have windows 7. What i found that worked was to get this mod:

 

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/8530/?tab=1&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fskyrim%2Fajax%2Fmoddescription%2F%3Fid%3D8530%26preview%3D&pUp=1

 

 

With that mod, you are able to see the default armor in their inventory that any character uses, which cannot normally be seen. With that I was able to manually remove their default armor and place in what I wanted them to wear.