I put in Morrowind Comes Alvie 5.3 (merging the leveled lists with Morrowind Advanced) and, sometime in Balmora I was attacked by thugs, the guards took care of them, but now the combat music's playing even when I'm not in combat, I can rest, it still plays, I go into an interior cell and it stops but when I come back out the combat music starts right back up again.

I've had this happen without MCA. Maybe Morrowind gets a little confused sometimes and there is some enemy in combat mode, but for some reason they are not acting hostile. If you can figure out where the enemy is, you can open the console, click on them and use the "StopCombat" command.
If you can't figure out where the enemy is, you can probably clear the combat status by having your character rest for 72 hours in some other cell.

I've had this happen as well. In my case it is usually caused by a creature being in attack mode, but unable to reach the player. try walking out of town a ways and see if the combat music stops. If it does, you probably have a creature (or hostile NPC) stuck somewhere. JMS's solution should work great in that case. If the music doesn't stop, you may have a script conflict somewhere.

The game occasionally places random spawns inside of terrain, such as large boulders or stacks of crates, etc. I've seen Scrib legs appearing and disappearing along the base of a rock on more than one occasion. In later versions of MCA (5.0-5.2), some of the hostiles will draw weapons and charge to "attack", but not actually attempt to hit you, so if you react and swing at them, YOU are the aggressor, and the guards may decide to attack you. In this case, though, I suspect that there's a hostile MCA NPC that can't get to you for some reason (on top of a building with no stairs, stuck behind or inside an object, or some such issue. Leaving for 3 days should cause a respawn.

That fixed it, thanks.

But now there's another bug, which is annoying. I noticed it when entering Arille's Trade House, but it's likely in other places, too. Anyway, whenever I enter, a Drunkard opens up a conversation, and no matter what I reply, the game crashes.

I've seen this reported by a few people, but don't think I've seen a fix. You might be able to remove them entirely by making a little plugin in the CS that sets the ChanceNone to 100 for the leveled creature object: _MCA_drunkards_in.

Yup. Did that with the blasted footpads.... set to 35%.

On the topic of odd MCA bugs, here's one that I've been wondering about but can't really seem to find reference to elsewhere:


When I commit a crime for the first time in a given character, when the guards / MCA vigilantes notice, I am hit with a "Runfunction index greater than function count" error. If I press to continue, resolve the crime, and then save my game, the error will not occur again regardless of whether I do / do not commit further crimes. If I do not save and reload again, the same behavior will result again, and similarly any new character will have it happen. Does this sound like a load order thing, perhaps, or am I just lucky?

I've seen this occur in a couple different situations. One is when you run a MWSE mod that requires a newer version of MWSE than the version you are running, and in another case, it was a strange sideeffect of recompiling a bunch of scripts in MWEdit. Recompiling that script in the Construction Set fixed it up. It's possible other situations may cause this too.