Helpful Empowering items hint.

When you go to empower that nice lesser ring of power you found, be sure to *wear* it while you empower it, or stick it into a container like a gem pouch.  Just don't keep it in your general loose inventory.  If it's just in your backpack, when you add your enhancement, you'll pay the price, but lose the ring due to how rings are "stackable" items and the actual script is doing something with a duplicate of your item it spawns in your inventory for just a split second.

So yeah, you can bypass that by either sticking it into a gempouch, bag of holding, ect, or just wear the dang thing as you enhance it