So, I recruited Sergeant RL-3 today and everything was fine. I loaded him up with all my extra gear. Then I couldn't activate him. I can't talke to him or pickpocket him- nothing. I've tried going to an earlier save, disabling all my mods, restarting the computer. . . nothing works. Obviously, the easiest answer is the save is corrupted but I'd REALLY like to know how to avoid this in the future. Any thoughts?

UPDATE
I had made some minor changes to the hiring dialog for Sergeant RL-3 AFTER I had hired him. One would think that since the quest was no longer running it wouldn't affect this playthrough and of course one would be wrong. Reseting the quest variable worked and everything is good. I would totally delete this topic but there doesn't seem to be an option.

- Ryan Paul Fialcowitz