Harry1982

Nice to a see solution, and that you came back to post it for the rest of us!

I wonder if there are any .ini files associated with the voice logic?

Dont suppose its happening with other games? Can you give any more info...? Obviously, try reinstalling graphics drivers. If not that, uninstall the graphics drivers and the video card itself and check the cooling situation out of the card such as dust etc. Looks like corrupted drivers, overheating gpu, or sadly, a dead gpu. If its dead, seek warranty or a shiny new upgrade! Hope that helps and you can get back to playing soon!

Yeah, looking decent enough with that sorta rig! Nice work. Did you end up turning off depth of field?

Well my experience was pretty much like the OP mentioned, but I was getting random system lockups which forced me to hard reset the laptop by holding down the power button. (Yes, tried different things to detect if it was JUST a Skyrim lockup ie; alt tabbing and log checking, as well as all the other things mentioned.) Anyway, after trying a whole bunch of stuff, I gave up and stopped playing. Then I started getting the same issues with some other games, and contrary to what I just said above, I finally tried declocking my card by about 20Mhz. Seems to have fixed my problem right up so far as at least in Skyrim it hasnt happened again, yet. (I probably shouldn't be typing this...Murphy) intel 2630QM nvidia 540M (296.10) 8gb ram So far, playing along nicely with FPS 30-60 and I've even re-activated all my mods! Wahoo!!!

Google console commands to remove the elder scroll. Do the quest. Replace the ES with another console command. At least, have you tried that method? Thats what I'd be looking into...

This. For reference, if someone is reading this because you have a problem with Esbern in the Ratway Warrens, read on. SOLUTION: In your install directory there is a file "\Data\Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa". You need to download the BSAopt tool. Use it ant extract the contents of that BSA to the same directory that the original BSA file is. You'll end up extracting the files and they'll be placed in the directory "Data\sound\voice\skyrim.esm\maleuniqueesbern". After that, you're done. Just start the game up and try again. I had to extract to a dummy folder on the desktop, then copy/merge the extracted sound folder into the X:\XXXXXXXX\The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim\Data\Sound folder. Worked like a charm, Esbern talking and progressing the quest. Bloody Skyrim....if it wasnt so cool I'd throw it out because of the massive number of bugs. :-\

Any takers? Anyone have some advice for a similar existing mod or the like??

Good morning!! How about a small mod to display the equipped gears stats vs what you are "mouse-overing" in game? Example: Looking at a new sword laying on the ground/in dead enemies inventory and you can see not only the stats of the new item, but a comparison directly there beside it, kind of like floating tooltips from WoW, by either holding a key or have it permanently displayed? I looked but cant find anything of the sort. And yeah, I used to play WoW a long time ago and this is one of the UI (using SKYUI now) features that I really miss! For me I find it tedious to do this manually either by picking up the item then opening inventory and comparing and then dropping it if its not better, or finding my item in my inventory, remembering what the other items stats were, then leave it on the ground if its not better. All in all, just to have the two items stats/description available on screen at the same time for a direct comparison (and/or incorporating positive/negative gains via automatic green/red numbers) would make dungeon runs and general looting so much more streamlined and more of a secondary action rather than the clunky, obnoxious process it is. I'll go post this or a link to this if I can in the SkyUI comments/feedback! Peace!