I have placed some smoke emitters in a worldspace and tested in CS running a havok test, all works fine, they are throwing out smoke above the ground and in the right direction (up),.

Run the game and nothing. Help.

Do the smoke emitters have an editor marker? The weird thing is that editor markers cause problems with particle effect - even though it is really the only type of object where you can't work without them. The problem is that particle effects take some time before they start to play if an editor marker is present. Sometimes it can take up to several (real) minutes. So either wait to see whether it works or remove the 'editor markers present' from the bsx flags (and delete the editor marker node branch).

EDIT: Increasing the frequency of the particle effect can speed things up a lot, but it will also speed up the particles.

True. Though the player can "trigger" particles if he shares the same space and "collides" with them. Then possibly all other particles in the same cell will start to work as well.

Anyway there's a solution to this. All you need to do is to add "dummy" NiControllerManager which actually does nothing. Particles with editor markers and with NiControllerManager always start properly as they should (there's no need for triggering them or waiting).

Here's http://www.4shared.com/account/file/FAWAYu6h/smoke-manager.html I created with medium smoke (meshes\fire\smokemedium.nif) and with added simple (and almost empty) NCM. It works properly in my game anytime unlike the "clean" particle meshes.