Thank you for such detailed feedback. Unfortunately I'm still having problems. I have no mods installed, the game is completely vanilla. I deleted everything, documents, appdata, and steamapps folders, then reinstalled. I did what you said, running the game once and playing the beginning through with hard saves. I edited the custom.ini, installed f4se, and the game crashed before the logo screen. I tried verifying files and running again, running f4se as administrator, no luck. This means it has something to do with either the ini files or the appdata folder but I don't know what.