In this post by Abot, he mentions the idea of multiple references to the same object and that OpenMW could just use the "nearest one" if there are duplicates. Pretty useful idea and would avoid lots of crashes, if I'm understanding it correctly.
His post reads:
"I think the ideal place where to handle this would be OpenMW, so it behaves as Morrowind engine as possible regardless of who improperly uses a unique object in 2 places (Bethesda or modder X) e.g. in case of multiple references to the same object present, OpenMW could use the nearest to player coordinates. "nearest to player coordinates" would probably approximate well enough the "first loaded in memory" used by Morrowind engine, keeping both good compatibility and the new possibility of using objects not loaded in memory. "
Multiple references for same objects
Re: Multiple references for same objects
Not in favor of this idea. The result of a script should be reproducible no matter where in the game world the player is. What we currently have (list cell coordinates in descending order) is enough to work around the issue of non-unique objects in the official ESMs. Errors in non-official files are up to the respective modders to fix.