I have had similar problems to yours before, though I did not thoroughly investigate to correct the problems; I only looked for alternative solutions.

I found that using !reloadmodule (and !unloadmodule) with comdlgls would not work with my scripts; I had to always have it loaded. Seems the sequence or timing is off?

I think recent versions of mzscript do not support spaces in variables' values to be saved anymore, like older versions could. You'll notice there are no quotes in varfiles. mzscript can hold variables including spaces while in memory, but saving to a varfile will only result in the first word being written.

I suggest you downgrade mzscript (only if your scripts still work), or use textedit instead, since it can write spaces. Also, if a recycle isn't required, you might want to try !reload'ing (with the textedit'd file include'd), and then !reloadmodule icondesk and whatever else needed.