Thank you for that, its good info that I didn't know. The spaces issue is probably what I was running into with the portraits.Make sure that the filename is .png or .jpg, and has no spaces. I've seen a number of packs where checking for spaces and removing them--"portrait .png" for example--and they work fine. This is the usual cause.
The data is actually stored as an 'enum' which means that it can only be one of the bespoke items on the list. So if you have data which doesn't fit that, it defaults to a different value that is on the list, usually the first on the list.