it's kind of hard to know what you're asking

The edge is soft if the colour of two faces graudually blend into each other due to the changing normals
the only way to change the normals like that is to have a soft edge

the only thing i can think of is that your face isn't planar (the vertices don't exist on the same plane)

what's the relevance of mentioning your 20 million different programs? programs don't interfere with each other.

perhaps a screen shot of the wireframe of shaded with soft-hard edges displaying. and a rendered image so we can see that the hard edge is changing the normals of the faces like a soft edge.

sorry, i wont believe it until i see it given the definitin of soft and hard edges