About the thing with the "D"... I believe that is probably indicating it is marked for deletion; which would mean either later in the game-session it would go bye-bye, or after Skyrim is restarted. I would write down the FormID, then exit and restart Skyrim... then try to perform some function on that FormID in the console; if it says go f yourself - you know it's gone... and that the deletion is delayed for whatever reason and for however long.

About the convo we had a while ago: I recently found that basically no plain static can be made persistent - in the respect that it cannot have functions performed on it once the 3D is unloaded (the cell it contains becomes detached). The record may be flagged persist, it may say it in the wiki, but it simply does NOT behave as a persistent object should... no matter what script or anything is doing whatever to it.

By converting all my statics to either movable statics or activators, it makes them perma-persistant and I can do about anything I want with the object, no matter where it is. I haven't checked to see if actors behave like this yet.

[EDIT: I agree with Amethyst about not going near 1.6 until the real deal is released.... and not just because of the 1.5024 fiasco. Unless you REALLY want to participate and help in the Beta testing, as opposed to simply getting a head start on your mod before the final is released, I wouldn't mess with it. Remember that Beta testing is to get the bugs known and fixed.. not for head-starts.]

Yeah, I did try exiting and restarting Skyrim - the reference was still there. Just going to hope that it gets fixed in the official update. I only downloaded the 1.6 beta because I wanted to check out the mounted combat, not for mod making (though I did like figuring out the new scripting functions).