Inoculate

What I'm looking for is a mod that can enable Ultra shadows in Interior cells and High shadows in Exterior cells. (or just swap the Resolution between 2048 and 4096). So perhaps not in the same sense as the shadowboost dynamic shadow distance mod, although that would be interesting as well. Is this something that's possible? Could it end up being really easy? The FPS boost from shadow res of 2048 just isn't really needed in the interiors and the extra fidelity there would be nice.

So, it was iFPSClamp=60 causing the problem. Issue is, it doesn't reset automatically as soon as you load a save, you'd need to zone into another area to see if it fixed anything, which I didn't do when I outright removed it. That or it might permanently break the animation in a specific area, I'll have to do some more testing. In the end I had to investigate further because I was getting the vault door bug where they won't open, and the solution to that also fixed the fire barrels. So, hoping we can have some viable search results on this now. The solution is using iFPSClamp=59, in my case. Upon further testing, anything that was affected by iFPSClamp=60 will not be fixed by switching it to 59. That is to say, if it already broke, it's stuck broken. So any new fire barrels are fine, the old broken ones are forever ruined on this save.

Alright I've gone as far as to use a completely fresh vanilla install and it's still going on for this one save file. So whatever this is, it's definitely save-specific. I'm a little pissed and tempted to start over to see if I get any better odds. Being save specific though, I'm sure this means there's a console command that could fix it, or perhaps that there was a console command which broke it (I doubt it, I'm not too reckless). Either way it's extremely minor but when you go out of your way to mod every little detail to be perfect and something doesn't work it's irrationally frustrating. I'll take any suggestions at all at this point. Shoot Preston 63 times in the face? Jump from the tallest building in Boston? f*#@ it, okay, worth a shot.

Do you have V-sync enabled? I have iPresentInterval=1 in the ini and Vsync turned on in NV control panel. (as opposed to "use 3d application setting". Also using iFPSClamp=60 but the other character I loaded up isn't having the barrel issues with my current settings so I can't imagine it's that. I've tried removing all esp mods, all texture mods, using a default fallout4.ini, anything I could think of. Still nothing. Still works for other save files but not this one. Really weird. Wonder if there's a story trigger or if I just need to sleep a few in-game days in a remote location.

Having this as well, but didn't seem to be able to get past it. Really surprised this is the only post about this anywhere. Oddly, I loaded a save for another character and it's not having the same problem. Same mods loaded for each one.

I hate to necro-bump but I'm having the same issue as OP almost verbatim. I want to update fallout 3 to 1.7 but running the patcher launches the game at the end, yet never actually updates. I can go to settings and see that it's still at 1.0.0.12. I've run it as admin, and uninstalled countless times, clearing out every mod in the fallout 3 directory. Without updating to 1.7 I can't use FOSE at all, which removes a few good mods from my list. This worked before and I had no problems. I made the mistake of installing a weather mod I didn't care for and had to uninstall the game, now I can't even get past the update so I can reinstall the mods. FOSE worked perfectly before, the only thing I did was uninstall, reinstall, and re-run the patch. Now it simply won't upgrade. edit: Well somehow I got it to work, I'm not sure exactly what I did. I removed one of the dll files from the fallout 3 folder so that it wouldn't run when it launched during the update. This wasn't even the first time I tried this but I did it right after a clean install, ran as admin, and removed pretty much everything from the fallout 3 folder that wasn't DLC, for some reason, it worked. This wasn't a problem before but I know if I ever uninstall again I'll have to deal with it, it felt like such a fluke that it suddenly worked.