[andrewas]

BG2 hunts for the files by path and name - if its in ~/override and has the right filename, BG2 should find it. It is a fairly common error with the merchants to extract them to ~/override/override which wont work for obvious reasons. Dosent sound like what your are describing though.

The other behaviours your describing dont sound like the behaviour of any rational OS, so Im thinking something on your system is broken in some way.

Also - whe you say file type, do you mean the three character extension of the file is changing? If so, its bad. .ini should stay .ini at all times, every OS ive used uses .ini files to some degree.

If you have some kind of text mode command terminal available, use it to verify file names. GUIs pull all kinds of "user-friendly" tricks, text mode never lies.