I've got a smithing skill in the eighties, and I just got the Shield of Solitude. The armor value's decent, but the added magic effects make it really nice, and I wanna use my smithing to improve the base armor value...but it doesn't even appear on the list when I go to the armor-improving workbench. And yes, I have the perk that allows me to improve magic items.

Is this an error, or is this supposed to be this way? This is the first weapon or piece of armor I've run across that doesn't seem to be able to be improved.

I am not sure if it's intentional or an error.

I have noticed that if a unique item has the material type in it's name, you can upgrade it with Smithing. Like Ebony Mail and the Ebony Blade are unique Daedric artifacts that you can upgrade via the grindstone and workbench (provided you can smith enchanted items, of course). Even non-unique items with names like of can be upgraded, so long as they have iron, steel, elven, orcish, etc in the name of the item. Those you find without the material type in it's name, even if they can be found all over the place, can't be upgraded.

Skyrim Nexus. Lost Art of the Blacksmith. That is all.

Hmmm. I might resort to that in time, but for right now I'm trying to avoid using mods until Bethesda finishes with the patches and people have time to adapt their mods to the patch versions. I remember the first (second?) patch gave people running mods some problems.

Yeah, this is really frustrating. Artifacts with iron/steel etc. in the name being available for upgrades makes this sound like a bug. I hate that there are a bunch of unique items that I can't upgrade. I'm guessing patch 1.3 hasn't addressed it.

Well, the item itself is still worth using. It's about 10 points behind a Legandary steel shield for me, and orcish and ebony are only a couple points better than that, so once you factor in the enchantments it's still better than unenchanted shields even with the lower base armor value...but it would be nice to be able to improve the thing.