Believe me Bob, I know your frustration! I would fully reccomend, if you use the same roster of characters fairly often, setting up shader folders for them. Highlight each clothing item separately (I group by clicking on the Owner tab in the materials window), click on the first desired to that piece, hold down left control and either drag down or click individually all related surfaces. In the shader box on the far right of Reality, there's a drop down box where it says Shader Operations or something similar. Click on that with your desired selections highlighted, click Save Shaders or whatever it says (the first option), which will open a directory window, probably to Roaming Data for Reality or Studio in Windows.

I set mine up in my Documents folder for wherever the main project is and make a character folder, for instance, Sandman Lux Shaders, then create folders for his skin textures, any clothing items in one folder, shoes/boots, props, weapons, etc etc. Each folder gets the highlighted shader settings for its individual aspects and nothing gets overwritten if you choose another character with the same prop which has a different diffuse color or glossy setting. It's a bit of set-up the first time, but man oh man does it come in handy. Just make sure you go through all the tabs to make sure the trans, bump/normal maps are correct, and I like to remove all displacement maps if possible.

Next time you load that character and the settings are mucked up, highlight the same, click the shaders operation box and select Load Shaders in the drop down box. Find your folder ('Recent Files' is a blessing!) and voila! Bing bang boom. 

ACSEL does the same thing, but (and this may be incorrect) I've noticed that if someone else saves it to the directory, you get their settings. I spend hours setting up scenes sometimes, shader-wise, and sometimes use the same texture maps on different characters with differnt morphs, etc. The folder option is a nice back-up to keep everything the way I prefer that character's doo-dads.

Just an option Bob. 

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