Character template with rules issue

[Kabluey]

I've created a character template for my campaign, which included some modifications to the rules that I selected through the View/Edit Rules dialog. When I start a new character with New Character From Template, everything works fine. The rules act as expected. However, I've found that when I save a character built with this template, then reload it, the rules do not work.

So I have two questions:
First, is this expected/normal behavior?

Second, assuming this is expected behavior, what is the best way to deal with this? I could have the players load the Rules file whenever they load the character, but that obviously is inconvenient. I also noticed that the hdc file has an XML attribute to specify the rule file and if I set this to the path to my rules file, then all works fine. However, if I set this in the base template, then everyone has to have the file in the same place, or else each person has to set it himself. Or is there another way around this that I'm not seeing?

Thanks.

[Simon]

Under your app prefs, you can specify a template directory and a rules directory. These are the directories that HD will look in if it does not find the template or rules files at the path specified in the XML. When you give your players the custom template, they should place it in whatever directory they have specified as their default template directory.

[Kabluey]

Okay, perhaps I'm missing something, but I've tried this and still it doesn't work. I went in and set my default template and rules directory in app prefs to the directory where the template and rules live (same directory in my case), did New Character From Template (rules correct at this point), made a small change, saved the character, restarted Hero Designer, and then loaded the character. The template seems to load, but the rules do not.

When I look at the hdc file, it still has RULES="Default" as an attribute of BASE_CONFIGURATION. Is this correct? If I manually change this to the full path to the rules file, then the rules work correctly. But if I just put the rules filename without the full path (the rules file is in my default rules directory, as specified in the apps prefs), it does not.

Perhaps it's the way I created the template? I basically built it as a character, setup the rules and saved them, then saved the character as a template. Do I need to make any manual adjustments to the template xml?

Thanks for your assistance.