Well, normal smoothing relies on mipmaps to work, the more you smooth the normals, the higher the mipmap level is sampled, essentially using a blurry normalmap to give the illusion of "smoothed normals". So disabling mipmaps would have the result of disabling normal smoothing.
That's good to know. From further experimentation it appears that turning off mip maps disables the skins normal smoothness setting which is why I'm seeing a difference. Maybe I just had normal smoothing too high.
That makes sense. It basically means that a different normal smoothing amount is needed for close ups than for full character because the effect is multiplied at distance. Not sure if there's any way around that. Maybe disabling the standard mip maps when normal smoothing is being used rather than having both.