Interesting. It seems the CTD issue should be examined furter. But this issue have most likely nothing to do with the CTD: The NMM does replace the existing file with the one of the new mod, there is never the same texture/file in the same folder. If you uninstall a mod (A) through the NMM the manager replaces the file that you are uninstalling with the other file that should be there from the other mod (B). If the other mod (B) is still active (green) the manager knows that the texture from (B) should be on the place in the DATA folder, if you uninstall (A). All files are copied from the "virtual folder" that you have set during the installation of NMM. Side note: Existing files that where in the DATA folder before NMM installed any mod, will be moved to "\Nexus Mod Manager\mods\VirtualInstall\_overwrites" So the game can not decide what mod texture it should load, because there only exist one file in the data folder! What i think, that could happen here is: the mod texture, that you are using, have a missing mipmap and the game loads the vanilla low-res textures first from the .ba2 archive. After the game have decided that it can load the high-res texture, it loads the replacement texture from the mod/DATA folder. AFAIK the game is optimized to load the textures only as needed, the .ba2 archives are optimized for this. So this MAY be possible, but this is only a speculation from me. The other thing: the slow texture loading was reported from day 1. I mostly hear that complain from users with high end systems who have maxed out everything. I think you have just realized this issue now, when you have spend so much time in investigating the CTD problem. --- Have you tried to uninstall all mods from your data folder? Uninstalling through the NMM may still leave some files in the data folder. Try this: copy/move all non-vanilla folders and files from the data folder (just copy them into a new Unnamed folder). Then try again with both ini methods. Only these files should remain: