Sigh... I've been reading all night trying to get some plant models from DoD to not have their blue background on them in Halflife. I've tested many combinations of "solid", "texture", "additive", and "normal" at 0 and 255. Nothing I try seems to work. I tried the cycler_weapon and I kept picking it up like a weapon, so that was a no-go.
I have hammer 3.5 (says when it starts up), the halflife_fgd_02 from VERC, and I pulled the models out of DoD and placed them in a subfolder in the models folder in Valve. I'm compiling it fast, with normal rad, and I'm doing this in Halflife 1.1.1.0.
It's 4:34 am and I give up (for the moment).