Hello everyone,
As I'm sure you can all imagine, I'm here to address an issue I've been wrestling with quite a bit.
The scenario: I've recently reinstalled Skyrim after a long hiatus, and as I've described in the topic line, the game is unable to establish any set display settings. Every time I launch the skyrim launcher I get a message that states "Skyrim will now detect your video hardware and set video options accordingly." followed by a message stating "Video settings have been set for Ultra High Quality." Despite this, when I actually open up the options menu and look at the display settings windowed mode is checked, and resolution is set to 800x450 (hardly "Ultra High Quality" if you ask me). Here's the kicker: If I try to uncheck windowed mode and hit "ok," then go back into the options menu, windowed mode is magically checked again. Baffling...
Things I have tried: One would think this points to some kind of issue with Skyrim being able to write to the documents folder right? Because that's where skyrim.ini should be located which houses all the display settings etc. And, indeed, I am lacking that skyrim.ini file. Now, I can create the file myself. I do have an old skyrim.ini file from a previous playthrough (along with an entire skyrim folder from "C:\Users\UserName\Documents\My Games\Skyrim from a previous playthrough) that I can copy/paste into my documents folder. And, doing so does get the game to run perfectly fine with those settings. However, that does not fix the core issue of Skyrim not being able to create/write to that file by itself. Now one might think it has something to do with system permissions, but if I right click on the documents folder and go to the security tab it is clearly stated that both the SYSTEM, me as a user, as well as Administrators all have permissions for full control (all checkboxes are set for "allow" and not "deny"). This, of course, includes Read and Write access. One puzzling thing is that the Properties menu for the documents folder does have the box for "Read-only" filled in, but much like my windowed mode if I try to unfill that box (and hit apply and ok), it refills itself when I open the menu back up. I also don't know what the difference is between a filled in box for "Read-only" and a checked box for "Read-only." I've also tried making sure my graphics drivers are up to date, I've tried logging into the game and creating a new save file (which the game is also unable to maintain), and I've tried completely reinstalling the game... again. None of which has produced any fruit.
System specs:
Graphics: GeForce GTX 1080 Driver version 390.65 (latest version)
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 1400 @ 3.2 GHz
RAM: G. Skill Trident Z 2x8GB DDR4 3200 (Running @ 2333 because... Ryzen >.>)
PSU: Seasonic X-Series 1050W
Game Version: 1.9.32.0.8
SKSE Version: 1.7.3 rel 48
Now I cannot stress enough that this is an ENTIRELY unmodded game - not even the unofficial patches. The one key exception is I do have SKSE installed (mostly because I can't really figure out how to uninstall it since I installed it via silverlock's installer). However, I'm running the game through the official skyrim launcher and not through SKSE (though I have tried both with the same results).
Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm sorry about the wall of text. I just wanted to give as much pertinent information as possible so as not to repeat troubleshooting steps that have already taken place.
