There is something odd with the file. I moved the metarig armature out of the main rig collection (and also tried regenerating it), but that didn’t make any difference.
When it’s linked for second time, it’s doing what I described a few comments back. The armature data is being shared between the two copies of the Armature object. Every other time I’ve done this with a rig, the data block is duplicated (with a ‘.001’ name).
To get around that, you can make it use it’s own instance of the armature data.
Select one of the armatures, and go to the Armature tab in the properties pane. If you click on the box with ‘3’ in it (three users of the armature data), it will copy it for that armature object, so it’s not sharing the same data with the other linked version.
Hmm, so that’s a strange one. There must be something just a little different somehow with your file compared to what me and magpie do/have.
It could take ages to figure out exactly what.
I guess one thing to maybe try, is start a whole new file and append in just and only what you need for animation, etc. Group it all in a collection, maybe try a new collection under the default scene one. Save that and then try to link that in (just the new collection) into another new file a couple of times and see what happens.
Finally this does work. And now that I know it has to do with something with the rig files I have, I will backtrack with rigging guys to figure out what is going on because I have tried with so many different rigs including characters and it behaves same in all of them.
But for the time being, this provides a way to work with multiple links of same rig so I will mark this as a solution.
Thank you so much for all your help.
