I discovered this very annoying fact while working on my Vampire mod tonight.

I was tweaking the script that makes the vampire drop his weapons and shield to the ground before burning up in flames.

The dropped weapons would (after a short time) disappear right in front of my eyes!

I tracked it down to the part of my script that disables the NPC vampire body after a few seconds. The weapons that were dropped by the vampire NPC is somehow still "connected" to that NPC so that disabling the NPC also disables the dropped weapons and shield!

This is a real thorn in my butt for what I am trying to do. I have a few ideas on how to work around this but I thought I would record this information here and after any discussion on it here I will write this up in the Wiki as well.

That does not sound right, as a new item is created when something is dropped (but I cannot rule it out).

I am not familiar with how NPCs handle weapons and combat, but I tried to reproduce the scenario and the sword remained in the world after the NPC was disabled.

I tried it with a simple script that does its things in sequence each time a hotkey is pressed: (1) Equips a weapon, (2) drops it, (3) kills the NPC and (4) disables the NPC.

Btw, how do I force an NPC to draw his weapon?

You could use SetAlert or StartCombat I guess.

I will PM the script that is doing this to you. It is an object script on a token given to vampires.