Quote - I'm using the Ah environment light, I have ambient occlusion bias set very low, something like .013 and still I get glowing nostrils - am I doing something wrong?

Maybe you could post all of your settings.  I'm not sure which setting you mean by "occlusion bias" (Environment map saturation maybe).
This has only happened to me when I tried using a regular jpg image instead of a Tif converted Hdr source.