So, it's an engine issue, not really a Bash one. That's too bad. I'm a DBA, so I normally look at other ways to uniquely identify records and have that mechanism survive restructuring and whatnot. I guess Bethesda or Gamebryo found it easier to just wipe everything and rebuild the keys when the load order changes. Well thanks for all the info and algorithms! I'll keep pestering PM for the new tags and then see about implementing your suggestions.

If you can duplicate the cleaning and undeleting features of TES4Edit, it would be seriously awesome. I recently started from scratch with a new Oblivion install and reinstalling all mods, since it was getting too messy and I had learned some new tricks. But boy, is the cleaning process awfully long when you have to launch TES4Edit once for each mod, wait for loading, wait for filter, etc. The worst thing is that I don't need to be careful since I know exactly which mods to clean, I did it at least once... there's no reason for not automating this.

If you succeed, we'd be able to start a project somewhat similar to BOSS: a list of mod versions that need cleaning and/or undeleting, and a batch tool that uses CBash to do the job. This way what takes hours and is reserved to the most dedicated or OCD players will become accessible to all. Say goodbye to a lot of mysterious crashes, and that means less "omg help me" threads on the forum too .