> actually it seems 2 axis are flipped. man this is confusing.

Yep, just look at my diagram and you'll see what happend :

http://www.eclipsemods.com/flyby/NORMALS/TS_style_spatial_diagram.png

If you turn around the model so that the front is facing you, automatically left becomes right.

It is not that confusing, but I suspect that the VSE1.6 uses a different coordinate system then what I have used to decode the normals.
It is just a matter of reordering the indexes, nothing to worry about... ;)