So this is a problem I've been wrestling with for a couple of days now and I am at a loss. In game most of the hats (just hats) are showing up as just a monotone model. Ie the ranger grey hat I gave Cass is just a brown 3d model without any detail or texture. The Desperado Coyboy hat is a black model, the pre war baseball cap is a blue model. The construction hat Chomps wears is a yellow model. All without texture.

Where it gets strange is if I take the hat away (through trading with Cass or console commands) and give it back it shows up with an applied texture... at least until I reload or zone. Yeeeah. I've been scratching my head for days.

Now I confirmed that archive invalidation is set. I even tweaked the ini file and installed archive invalidated invalidated just in case NMM was failing somehow. I have tried installing texture mods (I didn't have any except Weapon Retexture Project when it first started happening.) I then removed the textures as that had no effect. I tried uninstalling the game via Steam... but left all the files it left... and reinstalled. Again to no effect. I have used BOSS to sort my load order. Etc.

So, my question is: what would cause this? What would cause textures that are available and apparently pathed correctly to fail to load? What should I be looking for? What experiments can I try to narrow down the cause? I mean I'm getting ready to uninstall the game and rebuild the save from scratch using Wrye Bash to tell me what I need but... I'd like to figure out what caused this in the first place to at least avoid repeating my mistake.

Okay. Well thanks for reading this far and any attempts to enlighten me will be much appreciated.

Cheers.