I came home to do a more exhaustive search for the case of the un-reset-able initial state of Maya particles. I came across a message thread from area.autodesk.com hosted by Autodesk . It says when the initial state is set, there will be a folder created in the current project called "initial state". Once this folder is removed, particles will lose their initial state information on the first frame of the previously set frame-range. A user even contributed 2 lines of MEL commands. Select the particle object and run the following : setAttr ".position0" -type "vectorArray" 0; setAttr ".lifespanPP0" -type "doubleArray" 0; This zeroes out the particle's per-particle attribute called position0 (this is the per-particle's initial state's position in local space), and set the lifespan to zero. I tried setting my project workspace, created a particle object and set my initial state for the particles. True enough...