Firefrorefiddle

Good news: figured it out. Bad news: feel like an idiot. There was a period in one of the boxes in the Vortex startup button that wasn't supposed to be there. I literally never noticed it because it was so tiny.

...okay, so I had the skse loader set to not run as administrator, but started not loading skse at all when it was like that- I kept trying the getskseversion command and getting nothing- so I set it to administrator again and now I'm back to it finding skse but not finding the game files.

And yes it's in the right folder. I tried uploading a picture but it wouldn't let me add it to the post.

After uninstalling and reinstalling skse64, again, I was still having the thing where on the first time the game loaded since the computer starting up, skse64 wasn't working, but as of the second time, it did work, but I got an infinite loading screen. So I tried a new thing- I started a new game while skse wasn't working, got a minute into the game, saved it, quit to desktop, went back in, skse was working, tried to start the game again. And this time got an error message that "the following files which that save depended on cannot be found, do you still want to try" and it listed all the game master files followed by the first mods on my load order, but it couldn't list everything so there was a .... So SKSE64 is starting the game- I'm starting via the .exe file, though I'm not running it as administrator, I turned that off and everything was just like before- but when it's working, it can't find the game? Oh and memory isn't the problem, I checked performance during the infinite load screen and it was at 3.8 GB. That should be no sweat.

I've thought about it, but I've also sent an email to the skse team, and I want to give them a good long while to respond first. It's summer, they might be on vacation, and it's a volunteer thing for them anyway. But if I never hear back I'll probably just uninstall skse. Though there are a bunch of mods I was looking forward to- there are some things in Legacy of the Dragonborn that don't work without SkyUI, and Simply Knock is pretty awesome sounding.

It turns out that it's not that I need to give the game an extra minute or two after restarting the computer for skse64 to start up, it's that the first time I start Skyrim after restarting the computer it's like skse64 isn't there, but the second time I start it up, it is. Also I think the lack of a "full" restart might not be new, it might have been happening all along even when the game worked. I realized I don't remember.

What happens when you disable enough mods to be back under the plugin limit? Maybe something from the newest update reinforced the limit.

I tried following this guide for creating skse.ini and adding the memory tweak, no change. https://steamcommunity.com/app/72850/discussions/0/540740500921363665/

And I disabled literally all of my mods that appear on Vortex (all but skse) and am still having the same problem? Must be skse since when I turn that off everything works.

Here is my skse.log file contents:

Also I keep seeing people say to check if your plugins have access to all the master files they need. How do I check that in Vortex? My separate install of LOOT isn't seeing any trouble like that. ETA: I checked them all on Vortex and am not seeing any errors, so I don't think this is an issue.

I've seen a lot of people talking about putting Skyrim SE with SKSE64 into a separate folder, away from Steam. But I can't find a tutorial on how to do it without ruining everything, though I swear I've seen one in the last several days as I've been looking into this. Does anybody have a link to one, preferably for working with Vortex?

I deleted it. No change. Thank you for the suggestion! Also I'm not sure if I've said but I went ahead and got rid of the archived data files and the "mod" of them on Vortex and just put them back into the file tree. That's how they were the one time I got everything to work, anyway. I'm no longer getting that warning from LOOT at least.

I tried turning skse64 off, and I noticed something. With skse64 on, it just goes straight to the menu fullscreen when the game starts. With it off, I get the little partial screen box where you choose "PLAY" and can mess with options, and then the Bethesda opening graphic and "boom boom" noise, and then the fullscreen menu. What does that mean? Is the game not properly restarting and truly turning off with skse64 installed?

I then tried disabling the SSE Engine Fixes mod and removing the DLL files and the log file one had made, and nothing changed. So I turned the mod back on, readded the DLL & log files, removed the scripts archive from the load order, and put the scripts back into the Data folder unarchived. Again, nothing changed. So SSE Engine Fixes can crash my game, if I try to use the Memory Manager, but it can't help me. It's gotta be the SKSE64 somehow.