Ummm... at the risk of appearing silly...

A day or two ago I switched my preferences to use compressed files, as an experiment. So this time, VSS saved the temporary textures for my Bijou as temp.mcz. But then it must still have been reading the saved file temp.mc6, which was created several days ago, when I was doing Pamela. 

Umm, should I rephrase that? Nah...

I switched back to not using compressed files, and it all worked correctly. Next thing to do is to see if it works okay using compression and deleting both temp material files.

Bizzy, baksun.

"If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn't like to be half of what I should be."
Mr Otsuka, the old black tomcat in Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)