monsfarrar

I can't speak on the navmesh vs memory leak debate, these are both potentially serious issues depending on the person's mod preferences and hardware. I can say that Skyrim consistently crashes on my system after using the same amount of RAM (around 1.7 or 1.8 gigs, I can't remember). Lowering settings and not using anything that would impact memory usage over the vanilla game slow the climb to that threshold, but can't completely avoid it. In fact, running the vanilla game after a fresh reinstall is still subject to this problem. Now, the only time this ever happens to me is in exterior cells ("Skyrim"); interiors, cities, the area outside Fort Dawnguard, etc never use enough memory to cause a crash. I can sit and watch the Task Manager open on another monitor and predict, quite easily, when the next CTD is coming. The only exceptions are when I'm moving through the mountains west of Solitude (specifically the road to Dragon Bridge), where the game will crash sometimes in under a minute, and the road heading east out of Whiterun, where the game will crash in about 3/4 of the average time elsewhere. Also, once memory usage climbs to around 1.6 gigs of RAM things get unstable. At that point trying to save or quick save usually result in a CTD (but with a successful save... usually), opening the inventory or magic menus will also often cause an immediate crash at that point. But if I avoid those things, the game will still inevitably crash when it reaches the aforementioned threshold of memory usage. Now, in my case, part of the issue is most certainly aging hardware but I know I am also not the only person who experiences an identical issue. Admittedly there are ways that solve or drastically reduce the problem for some people and there are a number of things I haven't fully explored. However, I feel that pretty much regardless of what I do (at least on my current system), I can only increase the time I can run around before the game kicks the bucket and not actually resolve the issue.

I've run into the exact same thing. The setstage console command does nothing. I can use completeobjective or completequest but neither of those trigger the finale script. You can use "enableplayercontrols" and "enablefasttravel 1" to move around Zion again, but the finale never shows up. I can find the various scripts for the conversation and the quest, but don't know enough about it to figure out where the problem is. I do know that killing Salt-Upon-Wounds one way or the other works fine, so there must be something wrong with the scripting for the last speech check.