Help request: Skyrim freezes on opening screen

[Guinefort1]

Okay, so I took a long hiatus from Skyrim because of school and because making mods for Oblivion provides constant distraction… So when I decide to return to Skyrim, I find that my game gets stuck on the opening screen. Joy of joys. I get this lovely screen when I select play from the launcher (look at the bottom of the entry to see what I am talking about).

 

Yes, it stays that way forever. No, the text options to load saves and such do not appear. I have no idea what is happening or how to fix it. The only way to exit from this screen is control-alt-delete, which closes the game, but Steam thinks it’s still running anyway.

I have tried:

• Verifying the game cache, which needed to be done anyway, but did not solve the problem
• Uninstalling and reinstalling the game via Steam download, which did nothing

A friend from school suggested that I try a “hard” reinstall using the original disk. Would that make a difference?

Last, I have been meaning to remove Skyrim from the laptop it’s currently on and put it on my newer one anyway… Would it be better to just go ahead and transfer it over rather than fret over fixing it on this computer? How do I preserve my play-through during the transfer between computers? How do I even know that relocating the game to another computer will solve the problem?

 

Edited February 29, 2016 by Guinefort1

[welshieboy]

The re-installation is normally our last attempt at fixing, so it should fix the problem - assuming it's not mod incompatibility.

 

You can transfer your saves over from your Laptop to your PC by:

 

Going to My Documents

Going to My Games

Going to Skyrim

Copy Saves and Paste in the same location on the new computer

[Guinefort1]

Thanks for the reply. I'll poke around with the mods first to see if that is causing the problem, and if that fails I'll bite the bullet and transfer the game to the other computer (I've been meaning to get that done anyway). And thanks for the feedback on saves-transfer. The system for transferring saves via Steam is somewhat obscure for me.

 

Any additional feedback from others would still be greatly appreciated.

[saurusmaximus]

Freezing/crashing on startup is usually caused by one of two things: either your game files are corrupted (as your friend suggested) or you have a mod dependency issue; i.e. one of your mods needs another mod to work and it's not there or it's corrupted somehow. Try disabling all of your mods except the DLC's and see if your game will start. If it does, add your mods back in one at a time until it won't. Then, you will have your culprit.

[Guinefort1]

Quick update. Got vanilla skyrim running just fine on the new PC. So I'll be retesting my mods one at a time to see if I can figure out which ones caused the problem.