Appearance Changer making templates unusable

This happened to me twice over the course of five minutes, so I figured I'd see if there's an easy fix. Both times, I was attempting to tint my leather armor template, when it suddenly got unequipped and placed into my inventory. At the same time, my character was equipped with a default looking cloth armor that spawned out of thin air. I was unable to edit the former template anymore, and what I currently had equipped couldn't be made to look like leather again, or even another kind of cloth armor, though it did retain the colors I was attempting to tint my leather with.

I've always heard that these appearance changers are notoriously buggy, but I've never once experienced it on any server, and happening twice in just a few minutes seemed a bit over the top to me.