I suggest you look at the FIDE title handbook (which you can find here: http://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.h...), section 1.46c, where it clearly states the following:

And yes Michael Fitch is *not* fide rated. Also he only had 2 foreign players (Zapeda and Van Wely).

mike k webb (1954): 1966
michael fitz (1981): not rated
lorena zapeda: not rated

<If you make that change on one player's rating, use the FIDE ratings on all players with them, and the USCF ratings for the rest>

nope, fide-unrated players are calculated differently - but they do count, with certain limitations (so i was wrong saying they don't count at all).

first, in a 9 round event <a maximum of 2 players can be fide-unrated>. (see paragraph/tables in 1.49). because webb has a fide-rating, this is ok. however consider this:

<Unrated opponents not covered by 1.46c shall be considered to be rated at the rating floor level. See FIDE rating regulations for the current level of the floor.>

hence, assuming that we can choose to let an unrated player count as 2200, the 3 players mentioned above will be counted as

1200 (rating floor)
1966
2200

in addition to
2770
2683
2592
2525
2272
2210

ra = 2269, score = 7/9 (78%), tpr = 2489 (for norm purposes)

this also follows (indirectly) from paragraph 1.48a:

<1.48a The minimum average ratings Ra of the opponents are as follows: GM 2380, WGM 2180, IM 2230, WIM 2030.>

<1.44a A maximum of 3/5 of the opponents may come from the applicant’s federation and a maximum of 2/3 of the opponents from one federation.>

3/5 of 9, rounding downwards (as specified in 1.44) is 5, while 7 of eseerman's opponents represent the us federation. it also violates the 2/3 of opponents from one federation (7 is more than 6).

the only exceptions to this requirement are mentioned in 1.43 a-e, where the only that might apply is

<Swiss System tournaments in which the competitors include at least 20 FIDE Rated players, not from the host federation, from at least 3 federations, at least 10 of whom hold GM, IM, WGM or WIM titles. Otherwise 1.44 applies.>

i guess there were enough fide-rated players from enough foreign federations, but i didn't check if there was enough title holders. let's see...

i found only 9 fide-titled foreign players, but i noticed why i didn't find zapeda - her name is zepeda!

so she's fide-rated, with a fide-rating of 2187. hence the corrected list of ratings are:

2770
2683
2592
2525
2272
2210
2200 (unrated, "gm-norm rule")
2187
1966

ra = 2378, score 78%, tpr = 2598

bartonlaos, unrated players are completely irrelevant for loek's (or any gm's) events - people don't <get> these ratings they are <technically assigned> for the norm calculations, they are only used for norm tpr calculations.

GM Kacheishvili, Gior GEO
GM Zapata, Alonso COL
GM Sundararajan, Kidambi IND
GM Van Wely, Loek NED
GM Hansen, Lars Bo DEN
GM Sadorra, Julio C PHI
IM Battaglini, Gabriel FRA
WIM Zepeda, Lorena Marisela ESA

i.e. only 8 foreign title holders (i erroneously counted a wfm first time around).

don't be too sure of that, parmetd. aryan tari (ny) and johan salomon (al) are both norwegian and members of the norwegian federation.

10 previous titleholders
2 norwegians

WFM Vazquez Maccarini PUR
GM Garcia, Gildardo COL
GM Mitkov, Nikola MKD
NM Kustanovich, Michael ISR
FM Berrios, Gabriel Angell PUR
NM Berisha, Enver SRB
Aird, Ian SCO
Angel, Antonio COL

now you're talking about <national> rating, like the uscf right? what national federations choose to do with their own rating systems is up to them, but norway does more or less the same thing as in usa: international tournaments played abroad are also rated in the norwegian system, using fide ratings for players without norwegan ratings.

in principle it's completely meaningless and utter nonsense to mix ratings and players from different rating pools like this, but the justification in norway is that doing this helps against the systemic <deflation> in the norwegian rating system (yep, we've got the other "problem").

norwegian ratings are generally lower than fide ratings (for basically everyone below 2200-2250 in fide), so the net effect is to inject rating points into the norwegian system.

consider the assymetry when a norwegian player (underrated, according to the above) wins or draws against a higher rated opponent: his own (norwegian) rating goes up, while there is no similar deduction from anybody else's rating (as foreign players are typically not added to the norwegian rating system unless they play more than one event in norway). regardless, when they <are> added, only a fraction of their actual games affect their norwegian rating, and hence their norwegian rating quickly becomes very unreliable - exactly like the uscf rating of non-us players who play very few games in the us (and for which i guess the uscf doesn't bother to rate games played elsewhere, for very natural reasons).