Strange behavior trying to load materials

I've been trying to get textures working on my car mod, I'm finding that:

It randomly stops updating the material on ctrl+R, then even after clearing the entire cache and restarting BeamNG, it will still load a previous state, or go back to a null white textureless state. After a bunch of tries, it will suddenly work, my normal and diffuse maps appear and everything is fine. Until it isnt again.

At one point the car loaded colored red with a strange wrinkle texture, maybe even a heightmap or artifact from some other texture in memory, that seemed to change form as I moved the camera around the car. Cannot see how this could have happend from one of my textures. Tried everything, nothing got rid of the texture, no restarts or cache clearing. Then after one restart it became white with the same texture, then on ctrl R, red again. Restarted my computer, problem went away. Later on, same problem again. Really should have taken a screenshot, it was trippy.

The final straw that sent me here was when I went to shut down my computer, and I find my shut down button has been replaced with "Color sel.." WTF?

Is this Torque3d screwyness? Anybody else have weird behaviour?

This is latest experimental, with Chrome, Notepad++, and Photoshop CS5 open simultaneously.