Looking for the best particle system. Where is it?

"One thing is that all my vertex alphad stuff is textured with alpha masked textures... maybe that makes a difference?"

It may. I will have to do a test to see.

I'm pretty sure aobut this vertex alpha thing, cause someone tried to write a terrain engine using an alpha blending technique I suggested, and they ran into a problem and I tested their code and it seemed like vertex alpha was to blame for the improper sorting.