Seems that If I apply a hair system to a patch then copy paste that patch in the model window and change the surface, only the first instance of the hair system is updated.
Also noticed I tried to add an environmental reflection map property to a hair system to simulate tinsel and the program became very unstable, I had a slew of unselectable attrubutes listed under the model. After rebooting they went away but the surface color didn't show the current color used but rather a color from another material.

Is there a cache issue with materials in this version?