Misbehaving Materials on MAC

So I am having trouble with textures acting weird and uncooperative when they are imported to a file on two different components. The exact same material is on each component, but it gets renamed and duplicated when the second component is imported. Then my materials selection option for the component reports “material not in model”. Can anyone explain why this is happening or how to avoid this on a MAC?

add an example that does this, and we can assist better…

or maybe a gif of what’s happening…

john