Maya 2012 average normals not working

bpears

I have a mesh that I broke into separate pieces, now to get rid of the hard edges where I broke the mesh, I average the normals of the border verts. However, it is acting strange for one of the mesh pieces, all the others are fine. It seems to incorrectly average them, making it darkened rather than smoothed.

I have tried unlocking normals also.

bpears

after recombining the mesh pieces, and trying again, they average correctly... makes no sense!