I just encountered a strange behavior of the CK I cannot explain. I have been editing my ENB support plugin, and after manually correcting some CK generated problems with water levels using the latest TES5Edit, I verified it was clean of same-as-master entries and saved.

I then proceeded to open that cleaned mod in the CK and do NOTHING other than hit save when it finished loading. Didn't load any cells, click any menus, nothing. Yet the saved plugin has a ton of same-as-parent refs re-added and needs to be cleaned again.

That is not what worries me, however. What concerns me is that on closer inspection in TES5Edit, some of the actual prefixes to ID's (the part that designates what position in the load order the parent mod is located) have changed!

http://www.iparadigm.org/images/test/ck1.jpg
(0304ADC7 vs. 0404ADC7)

The ID is actually the same, but for those that understand again, the first two digits of any ID in the CK designate the position in the load order of the master file containing that ID.

The only thing I can think of is that I didn't have Dragonborn installed last time I saved my plugin from the CK, however it does not have Dragonborn as a listed master so this should not affect the load order position of Dawnguard which is what this mod depends on.

If this is happening how can mods be relied on at all, when most people will not have the same combination of DLC and other masters and even then likely not in the same order? Maybe I'm just confused and this actually doesn't matter. But why is TES5Edit seeing it hard coded differently when both versions of the plugin have the same dependency list?