installed FOMM and now my texture & mesh folders in Data are bsa archives and i can only open them w/ FOMM. so when i add other textures & meshes they load in their separate folders. is this okay? tried installing them as FOMODS but didn't work. thanks

oh and i'm using the ArchiveII that is in FOMM. is that all i need, or do i need to manually change the ini?

It's fine. The NV assets come packed in .bsa files and some mods you download may come with .bsas of their own as well. As long as your Data folder looks like: Data\meshes and not Data\data\meshes you should be good to go.

The Archive Invalidation tool included in FOMM works well but if you have problems with missing textures, make sure that it did indeed edit all three of your ini files with the Fallout - AI!.bsa listed under the Archive section.