Metadata keeps wanting to be saved on assets.

This sounds like the common "lookup problem" that many of us have had problems with. Did you recently assign a lookup to a text field that previously allowed free text entry? An example would be a "Client" field - let's say you had a text field for your client, and allowed the user to enter the client name, and then you later noticed an inconsistency in the data, like spelling or formatting errors. So you created a lookup containing all your clients and assigned the lookup to the field. When you do this, FCSvr doesn't know what to do with fields that contain values that are NOT in the lookup. For example, if my client was ABC Company, and my editors put it in as "ABC Co." or "ABC" and then I assigned a lookup to that field, and entered "ABC Company" in the lookup, FCSvr has no way of knowing that "ABC" and "ABC Co." mean "ABC Company." So it will constantly give you the "The metadata has changed" dialog box even if you simply open the asset and don't change anything. You have to make sure all fields with lookups assigned have field values that are included in those lookups. One way to test if this is your problem is to click through each lookup and make sure the values selected in every lookup in that metadata group have valid values. This isn't easy, because if one is incorrect, it may show blank or [None] and you will have no way of knowing without examining the metadata at the command line. It's a pain. There are definitely some holes in the implementation of lookups in FCSvr, I could give Apple a huge list!

I just had this happen in another situation as well - same reason though, lookups. I added an item to a lookup at my desk machine. I then created a collection of new assets with that item selected in one of the fields. Then I went to another machine that had already had the FCSvr client open. FCSvr had not yet pushed the new lookup item to the instance of that client - it only happens when you log in... so any time I opened one of the assets I had created on the first machine, FCSvr gave me the "metadata changes have been made" dialog. All I needed to do was restart the browser so that the current instance of FCSvr client knew about the new lookup item.

The point is that FCSvr will give you this dialog anytime a value is assigned to a field with a lookup attached and that value is NOT in the lookup.

Anytime a field with a lookup is assigned a value, a record for that field value is created in the pxmdvalue_string_asset table. Once the record is created, it's there, and the only way to remove it so that the lookup reads [None] is to use the back-end psql command to delete that row in pxmdvalue_string_asset. Risky business, but it can be done. And, you also can't enter a blank ("") value in a lookup as a possibility, the browser won't let you. So if you use a script to push a blank value to a field with a lookup assigned, you'll always get the "Metadata needs to be saved" dialog. An option would be to create your own "None" item, and have that value be assigned when you want to make a field value "blank." That may be what you ended up doing.