Can anything be done about dead NPCs still moving?

[Asterra]

I went and solved a pretty old bug in the game, only to discover that my solution causes an upswing in the phenomenon of NPCs that continue to twitch, vibrate or rotate in place after they're dead. So what I really need is to know whether there's a function I can use on an actor ref that will tell it to re-ragdoll -- resituate its variables or whatever so the ragdoll isn't stuck trying to conform to whatever happened when it died. Something more subtle than resurrecting and re-killing it (which causes dramatic and obvious visual phenomena and has lots of complications). The function list for NV is pretty robust so I have hope there's something that can be done.