I've gone back to work on a mod I made awhile ago that worked beautifully and had everything packed into a .bsa,

I've gone and made the changes and everything works fine with loose folder files, however as soon as I go and try to make a .bsa everything goes wrong.

The game will not load the .bsa for reasons I am unaware of. The custom container I've placed in the world no longer shows up and the armors have no textures, just the purple mesh.

Could it be because I'm trying to use a .bsa for some files and have other files loose, all of which are used by the same .esp?

For example I have all textures packed but the armor meshes loose so that they can be modified by "Bodyslide" programs. Could this be why the .bsa won't load?

My mod only contains meshes and textures, so Textures and Meshes are checked in Archive.exe when I go to make an archive. I also have "Retain File Names" and "Retain Directory Names" checked.

The folder structure I have constructed for the archive directory begins with the Data Folder and it is that folder I select when I "Add Directory" in Archive.exe. ie. If you look at the directories of the files in the archive in the big window they all begin with "\meshes" and "\textures".

Help would be greatly appreciated so I can finalize the next version of my mod and publish it.

maybe try to get a copy of Fallout3ArchiveUtility. unpacks skyrim's bsa's too (and i find archive.exe pretty suspicious for unpacking myself.....)

Are there any other packing tools?

BSAopt would be one.

By the way, I have no idea how you are attempting to use Archive.exe, but what I can say is, that usually any directory name that starts with '\', like in '\meshes' would be interpreted as pointing to the very root of the drive in question, as in '\meshes' would be equal to 'C:\meshes', if we are dealing with the C: drive. I doubt that would be the intention here. Typically, directory names that start without '\' are interpreted as pointing to some default directory as their starting point, like for instance the Data folder for all things Skyrim. Whether or not this might be relevant to your case, I cannot say, as I have not personally tested anything that would be anologous to your situation, but it is one thought that came to mind.

I already have BSAopt, but I have no idea how to pack loose files into a bsa.

Here's what my screen looks like in Archive just before I go to save it:

Looks ok as far as I can tell, but then, whenever I have packed bsa's I have usually done it with BSAopt, so I couldn't tell for sure. Even my last use of BSAopt is some time ago, so I can't give an off-the-cuff walkthrough of that, but it should not be too complicated. The only thing that I can suggest would be to use some unpacking tool (like BSAopt) to have a look at how the included paths look like in the bsa that you have made. Hopefully there would not be an excessive 'Data' in the path name. Perhaps you could try leaving the root dir field empty.

If that does not help, you may have to wait for somebody to offer better advice.

Using BSAopt or even DDSopt produces the same problem. Except now the produced bsas are only 2KB in size! They extract fine using any of the programs, but I think there's something wrong with Skyrim as to why it's not loading them. I guess it's not a packer problem then.