Thanks for the reply HipMaestro, I left this alone for a while since I didn't get any replies straight off - just got back to it.
No, I have no haks, mods or whatever - I'm running straight NWN/Shadows/Hordes recently bought/downloaded from Impulse. Yes I have a set of rolling backsaves and level saves so hopefully I can deal with any corruption issues .....
Situation is I was running with Deakin and Valen and this happened immediately after I picked up Aribeth and attempted to buy her a decent long sword from the smith. I have not tried to buy Valen a new weapon this way so far - I can roll back and attempt to do so to see if its just an Aribeth issue, a general one or a corruption of my game files.
I might experiment round the problem but the question is:
Are you supposed to be able to buy henchmen weapons from the smithy or is this the game trying to say to me "Sorry, mate, you can't do that" but getting in a twist about it?