Massive game-breaking problem. Skyrim can no longer start.

[Elizinator]

so earlier today, i was testing a mod. i had papyrus logging enabled. After i was done testing, i neglected to turn it off. in the span of the afternoon, without me noticing until the very end, it wrote 80 GIGABYTES of papyrus log.

 

now yes, that might be a problem all by itself. But the real damage is that it completely filled up the drive. When i finally did notice this - i.e. when windows told me the drive was completely full - i closed the game and deleted the massive logs (i couldn't even open them. Notepad++ couldn't handle their girth. THE LOGS ARE NOT THE PROBLEM. THEY HAVE BEEN DELETED. LOGGING IS DISABLED.

 

 

I restarted skyrim, only to hear the opening theme, which i usually have disabled. It seems my Skyrim.ini was also deleted. And ever since, the game can't start. Infinite load screen before the main menu. No crash, no error log generated. nothing. it just sits there, memory usage gradually climbing. it never loads.

 

Here is what i have tried:

disabling all addons. a few i can't disable, or the game crashes before it even gets to the ILS, but even with only four addons enabled, the menu never loads. 

running Skyrim.exe without SKSE. This works. but of course it isnt usable, can't play modded skyrim without SKSE.

verifying game file integrity. no errors found. no help either

disabling ENB. no help.

re-building both .inis from scratch. first by uing BETHini Pie recommended settings, and then by jus deleting them and re-running the launcher to make new ones. no help.

restarting the computer. no help.

re-installed SKSE. good thing i keep backups. No help.

 

skse64.log shows no problems anywhere. everything appears to be loading correctly. I didn't change anything, anyways.

 

Please, I'm at my wit's end. My game is completely dead for no discernible reason. I need help.

 

reposted from the LE forum where it was placed by accident.

[traison]

5 hours ago, Elizinator said:

... it wrote 80 GIGABYTES of papyrus log ... now yes, that might be a problem all by itself.

 

No kiddin'. LL should have annual "worst Papyrus mess" -awards. You'd win 2026 by a mile I suspect.

 

5 hours ago, Elizinator said:

It seems my Skyrim.ini was also deleted.

 

How did you determine that? And which mod manager are you using?

 

5 hours ago, Elizinator said:

THEY HAVE BEEN DELETED.

 

Deleted as in deleted, or deleted as in recycled? Recycling files on Windows will still leave disk space allocated.

 

5 hours ago, Elizinator said:

Here is what i have tried: disabling all addons ... [except] ... a few i can't disable ... but even with only four addons enabled, the menu never loads ... running Skyrim.exe without SKSE. This works. but of course it isnt usable, can't play modded skyrim without SKSE.

 

Safe to say one or more of these 4 addons are are completely broken then? Debug this one step at a time: first the base game, then SKSE with no other mods, then SKSE with one mod and so on.

 

Anyhow, if we assume these 4 addons are things like the SKSE scripts, SSE EngineFixes and... maybe the CK's scripts; then the only thing I can think of is to run Process Monitor by Sysinternals (Microsoft) and see if it reveals where Skyrim is getting stuck. It will also reveal whether skyrim.ini is being read or written. If however one of these 4 mods is something silly like ENB, CS, CBPC, SMP or a purple dildo mod then, well, those kinds of mods really shouldn't be enabled right now.

 

If you do run procmon, don't upload its log here. They contain far more information than you think.

[Elizinator]

I determined the Skyrim.ini was deleted - or rather, blanked - because when i restarted the game, i heard the opening music, which i have disabled. i then navigated to the ini in explorer, opened it in notepad, and it contained one single line. interesting that my documents seem to either contain not nearly enough text, or way way too much =/

 

as far as deleted or recycled, it was recycled then deleted. the drive shows ive recuperated the space, and im certainly not getting warnings about disk space any more.

 

ENB is just about the only thing that appears to be working normally =/

 

ive been spending the last...bunch of hours attempting to narrow down which SKSE mods are doing this, because it seems like it has to be one of them. If i set MO2 filter to show only script extender plugs, and i disable all of them, the game loads. It is way more difficult that expected trying to navigate inter-dependencies and get as far as the ILS without crashing as i selectively re-enable them.

 

ill give process monitor a shot and report back

[traison]

31 minutes ago, Elizinator said:

I determined the Skyrim.ini was deleted - or rather, blanked...

 

And you looked at which file specifically? With MO2 you got lots of them:

1. In the game root.
2. In My Documents.
3. In each MO2 profile, depending on MO2 settings.

If you have MO2 set to use profile-specific inis, then the My Documents one being blank is irrelevant. The one in the game root as far as I know is not used so that one is irrelevant too.

 

34 minutes ago, Elizinator said:

ill give process monitor a shot and report back

 

Since you're on MO2, you will need to take into consideration the USVFS when in procmon. Some things will look odd as it redirects IO calls.

[Elizinator]

the ini in My Documents is definitely the one with functioning options. As i said, when i relaunched the game, settings had changed that i never touched. What the game mightve looked like i dont know, because i got caught by the ILS

 

luckily i had backups. or rather, Bethini made backups, so the loss was recovered immediately. but it did still completely erase everything in the file. I assume this was a consequence somehow of closing the game while the HD where the ini is located was _completely_ full. A few other things which were active at the time also had settings reverted to default. namely Notepad++ and some Firefox addons =/

[Grey Cloud]

On 2/7/2026 at 10:50 AM, Elizinator said:

ENB is just about the only thing that appears to be working normally =/

How do you know this if the game wont start?

 

You shouldn't even have the ENB active. In situations like yours step one is to get a working vanilla game.

[Elizinator]

On 2/6/2026 at 6:40 PM, Elizinator said:

 

1 hour ago, Grey Cloud said:

How do you know this if the game wont start?

 

You shouldn't even have the ENB active. In situations like yours step one is to get a working vanilla game.

Here is what i have tried:

disabling ENB. no help.

[Grey Cloud]

On 2/7/2026 at 10:50 AM, Elizinator said:

ENB is just about the only thing that appears to be working normally =/

 

[Elizinator]

I'm not sure what is difficult to understand about this.

 

The game hits an ILS before main menu. as i said right in the first post. ENB loads before main menu anyways. ascertaining that it is loading correctly is easy. However, as a routine troubleshooting step, I tried disabling it my removing the dll from the skyrim folder. then ENB didn't load, but neither did it fix my problem.

 

see?

back to my actual problem, as i have also already said, the problem is definitely related to an SKSE mod, since the game loads normally when they are all disabled. I am narrowing down the culprit at present.

[traison]

22 minutes ago, Elizinator said:

ENB loads before main menu anyways. ascertaining that it is loading correctly is easy.

 

While I agree with you that ENB is perhaps not that likely to cause an ILS, I will have to agree with Grey Cloud that you can not actually say whether ENB is working properly or not at this stage. Some shaders for instance compile the first time you encounter a certain object, despite there being that initial shader compilation/caching sequence.

 

The reason why I generally suggest people get rid of things like ENB and physics when dealing with crashes/freezes is that they're all easy to disable, and you really don't need pwetty gwaphics when the game doesn't work anyways. Having it disabled cuts off a minute or so of the startup time which is going to get significant when you're doing your 100th test.

 

When in a situation where removings mods until the problem goes away is the most reasonable solution (i.e. like in a freeze) the approach I would take is as follows:

1. Create a copy of the current MO2 profile.
2. Disable mods until the problem goes away, completely disregarding trying to keep everything in working condition: it doesn't matter if your mountains turn purple at this stage.
3. Once the problem goes away, create another copy of the original MO2 profile.
4. Disable only the latest batch in this new profile to make sure it can be repeated.
5. Once you know exactly where the issue is, remove the profile copies and apply the changes to your main thing.

I imagine Vortex can do something similar. This way there's never any risk of fumbling the troubleshooting in such a way that you break everything else while fixing the crash/freeze/whatever.

Edited February 8 by traison

[Grey Cloud]

15 minutes ago, Elizinator said:

see?

No. Firstly, you said "working" not loading. Those are two different things. Secondly, and I'm not certain here, if you are talking about the enbseries message that displays in the top left of the screen on loading that is just that - enbseries loading. The enb preset loading is a different thing.

 

On 2/7/2026 at 10:50 AM, Elizinator said:

It is way more difficult that expected trying to navigate inter-dependencies and get as far as the ILS without crashing as i selectively re-enable them.

Don't know how many you have but do half at a time. Find the half with the problem then half that half. Keep in mind that it may be more than one problem mod.

[Elizinator]

51 minutes ago, traison said:

1. Create a copy of the current MO2 profile.
2. Disable mods until the problem goes away, completely disregarding trying to keep everything in working condition: it doesn't matter if your mountains turn purple at this stage.
3. Once the problem goes away, create another copy of the original MO2 profile.
4. Disable only the latest batch in this new profile to make sure it can be repeated.
5. Once you know exactly where the issue is, remove the profile copies and apply the changes to your main thing.

 

 

success! at least apparently so. I dread the possibility that more than one mod is at fault here, but at least one culprit has been uncovered.

 

it was Dynamic Persistent Forms. First i could get the game to start by disabling it, and then i deleted the .bin file it creates in the skyrim directory, and now the game loads even with it active.

 

this was very nearly my approach but i was just making backups of my mod list rather than profile. unfortunately i started at the bottom alphabetically, when clearly i should've started from the top >_>

 

EDIT: well, it looks like a success indeed. the game now loads apparently normally even with all SKSE mods enabled. I guess the DFF .bin was corrupt or something? I'd certainly made no changes to load order, nor had i updated anything. Once the game loaded with it disabled, i checked its nexus page, and there is a big orange warning about infinite loads and CTDs, which is what lead me to deleting the bin. I lost some custom spells, but nothing that can't be rebuilt.

 

so it seems solved? Im going to try a few more times, but it looks good!

Edited February 8 by Elizinator
success...?

[traison]

2 hours ago, Elizinator said:

...then i deleted the .bin file it creates in the skyrim directory, and now the game loads even with it active. ... I guess the DFF .bin was corrupt or something?

 

My guess would be the reason is the same as why Skyrim.ini was truncated - this mod was writing to its bin file and ran out of free space. Typically the way you should write to a file is to always write to a temporary file, and only once writing has succeeded you delete the original and rename the temp file. Everyone does not follow best practices however - this appears to include Bethesda Softworks, not just the author of DPF.

 

2 hours ago, Elizinator said:

...i was just making backups of my mod list rather than profile.

 

Either way works.

 

2 hours ago, Elizinator said:

unfortunately i started at the bottom alphabetically, when clearly i should've started from the top >_>

 

Murphy's law states that whichever end you start at, the problem is at the opposite end. It doesn't matter where you start.

 

"If it can go wrong, it will go wrong."

 

2 hours ago, Elizinator said:

I lost some custom spells, but nothing that can't be rebuilt.

 

If the reason for why the bin file broke is what I'm thinking it is, then there's absolutely no magic you could even pull to restore the old data. Nothing outside shipping it to a forensic lab specializing in data recovery. These tend to start at ~$10,000.

Edited February 8 by traison