I hate to resurrect a thread this old, but in case you never found a solution, or someone else seeking answers comes across this, Colourful magic.esp seems to be the cause. I also had it in my load order when I saw your post so I tried to disable it and to my surprise it did indeed work as intended. so for anyone else having that problem if you have the colourful magic mod, just disable it until you finish character creation and whatnot, then reenable it and it should work fine. you will have to make sure the esp is always disabled when starting a new game though!
