Ok i made a companion and had the mismatching face texture bug.

Turned it into an esm and that worked fine.

Played with her as a companion for like 3 hours np.

Saved the game and exited, came back a while later and she is gone, i go to her spawn point in the inn and she is their with all her gear and when i try to recruit her again she says looks like some one is already with you.

i gave her the potential follower command 0 and current follower command -1.

any idea's?

out of curiosity did you load both the esp and the esm, or just the esm?

Just the esm since i changed the ESP to an esm.

bump

I did the same thing to get my custom companions up and running, they are working very nicely beside that problem!

I'm using esm+esp combination and I suspect the .esm might be causing trouble. (the esm is to extract the facegen and the esp contain information like combatstyle/class/etc.)

To sums up the problem,

I am able to recruit them and play with my companions without any issue. If I die I can reload and my companions will still be there.
BUT the problem show up when you exit the game!
If I restart the game and load my save, my companions will no longer be there and they will be back at their default location.
Atleast I can simply reinvite them to my party so It's not totally broken, just inconvenient and I like when my stuff run smooth. =)

I'm wondering if other people ran into this issue and have been looking for solution?

EDIT: I noticed also that if I save and exit the game while being in the default location cell of the companions they will still follow me when I restart and load my save.