I recently installed 3 weapon mods. a grenade launcher, single shot grenade pistol, and a tactical weapons mod. There are not any weapons being replaced or anything, just new ones added.

I thought I knew how to install mods thinking it was just like oblivion, but I guess maybe it is not.

The problem is that the new weapons all appear white. They work just fine it is just a major nuisance and tells me something is wrong. I read somewhere about some rampant issue with archiveinvalidation and also read that a lot of mods have text files to deal with it or something. Even one of the mod's readme file tells me to put the archiveinvalidation text into the data folder, but I can't find it anywhere.

I am totally lost with all of this and could use some help. And yes I have tried to find info to figure it out myself and I am sorry if this is a real newb issue.

First of all, in your Fallout.ini file, make sure to set this line, bInvalidateOlderFiles, to 1. And if you are using FOMM, which you should be, just use the archive invalidation utilities it provides. The process is actually much easier than it was with Oblivion. If that doesn't solve the problem then it has nothing to do with archive invalidation, but there's something wrong with the mod itself or in how you installed it.

I changed that 0 to a 1 and now all is well. thanks for the info. Also, I never have used any installer aid as I have never really needed one. I know where everything goes.

If you're referring to FOMM, it's more than just an installer aid. It also allows you to sort your load order, which can be very important. If you just dump a bunch of mods into your Data folder and activate them through the game menu, sooner or later you're going to run into a conflict that's going to cause problems for your game. Never make the mistake of assuming you know everything you need to about modding, there's always something new to learn. The fact that I was able to help you with this particular problem should have indicated that. That should have been one of the first things you learned about when you started modding your game.