Tried:
-Deleting History
-Deleting Preferences
-Checking Normals (manually examining)
-Set to Face normals
-Reversing Normals even though I knew they were right.
-Saving as MayaASCII then re-importing

And just about every combination of the 6 possible.

I know it knows what to do -- because I've gotten it to https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...jijo/hp002.jpg act correctly multiple times. Its just a fluke whether or not it works -- around 95% of the time it glitches out, other 5% it acts fine.

I don't like retyping in the same command 20 times to get it to do what I want :p