After migrating from NMM to Vortex, nothing worked, so ultimately I deleted everything - the game, all mods, kaput, and downloaded and installed a fresh version of the latest Skyrim from Steam. It runs fine. I then installed SKSE64. At this point I have nothing but a pristine Skyrim plus SKSE64. I then point my Vortex dashboard tool at SKSE64 and launch it. The game starts, but after clicking NEW, simply hangs. It doesn't crash altogether, just hangs with the Skyrim logo and music playing. If I launch Skyrim directly without SKSE, all is fine. So I thought there was a problem with SKSE. Not so. Apparently, it's only when launching from the Vortex dashboard that this happens. If I launch skse64_launcher.exe directly, outside of Vortex, everything works fine. Even though my Nexus widget has no environment variables or command line parameters specified, it is apparently doing something it shouldn't. Note that I still have no other mods installed, just Skyrim and SKSE. So if you're having this issue, you might just want to launch from the .exe and not from within Vortex, and don't bother the SKSE team about it. Add this to the long list of headaches that Vortex has become. I'm about done with Skyrim altogether at this rate. I spend more time managing and fussing with things to make my mods work than I do playing the game.