A Radical way to salvage a gave save when CTD occurs

[skymon5]

Thought I'd post on a radical way I salvaged some game saves that were very valuable to me, after I began getting Crash to Desktop (CTD) on new and previously stable Skyrim game saves.

 

CAUSE and TROUBLESHOOTING

So how did the CTD start?  I think it was after installing (I believe correctly) the OSA and OSex mods by CEO.  Some next steps I performed:

1. Initially tried removing the files I had added.  No help.
   
2. Ensured I ran TES5Edit and Loot
   
3. Verified game files via Steam.  (Steam re-downloaded the Update.esm, Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn for some reason.)
   
4. Reran Loot, then cleaned marked files (that had been downloaded from Steam) via TES5Edit.
   
5. Still got CTDs
   
6. Even dived down into Papyrus script checks to see what was going on.  Appeared to be too many "Cannot find..." or missing script entries in the very large log files.
   
7. Also as a final act of desperation, I tried the SaveTool that allowed me to eliminate orphan scripts.
   

 

Still no joy.

 

THE FIX

I finally went to one of my files, noting the Skyrim ess file and its paired skse file.

I then simply renamed the skse like so, from "Save 2101 MyCharacter Skyrim 81.37.11.skse" to "Save 2101 MyCharacter Skyrim 81.37.11.skse-bak" thus removing all SKSE components to the game save. 

 

I started back up my game using the SKSE_Loader.exe and selected the game save that now had no SKSE file.  Game loaded!  And then I received an error message that no scripts were found, but it would rebuild them.  I clicked through "OK" very happy with my discovery and glad to see some old friends from my Skyrim game save.

 

Don't know if this will help anyone, but I thought I'd share the info.

 

Good luck and happy gaming!