Disabling and re-enabling mods for Skyrim has hosed FNIS

[TheFinaleOfSeem]

I had a Skyrim 1.6.* save on Steam (but opened with the SKSE64 mod) in Win11 that was crashing when I tried to leave the Winking Skeever in Solutide. I'd recently installed Vortex and stuffed it full of mods for Skyrim. Things had largely worked fine up until this point with around 100 mods. I created a new hard save by the exit door, then started disabling mods in batches and trying again. No luck. After disabling every mod in Vortex and disabling any set in the Creation Club in the game, I still had no luck, so I figured I'd have to go back to a previous autosave and try again. So I re-enabled all of my mods in Vortex. The thing is, it's not reinstalling them properly in the Skyrim folder and yes, I have tried deploying them from the menu. I have not messed with settings within Vortex. Everything is pretty darned vanilla and stock in that regard. Staging folder and deployment method have been untouched.

The Skryim folder is far less cluttered than it was before. The mods are working as far as I can tell, but I need to rebuild FNIS...but the Tools folder does not contain the generator directories at all. I removed FNIS completely, redownloaded it, redeployed it, and still no dice. I manually downloaded it, tossed the folders into the Tools folder from the zip file, and the program runs, but won't build due to a missing file in the scripts folder. In fact, the scripts folders don't even exist! So I dragged everything out of the zip archive into the correct location, and the FNIS generator runs, but can't find any mods at all because it doesn't appear that they've been installed in such a way that FNIS can find them, even though it had no issues prior. Previously it would have generated a ton of data, but now it's generating 0 out of 1. At least everyone isn't frozen in an A-pose anymore, but I'm still not sure if everything is working properly. It's certainly an odd change and manual copying of files should not have been necessary.

While everything seems to be back to normal, it seems odd that Vortex is not properly redeploying at least some of these mods into the Skyrim directory. The only other factor I can think of is that I verified the integrity of the game files through Steam after confirming that turning off every single mod didn't fix the problem, but that should be a scenario that Vortex takes into account. After all of this, I tried a full purge/deploy, but it's the same thing. Vortex seems to have incorrectly different behavior on a completely new, fresh install vs just about any other operation after the fresh install.

[7531Leonidas]

Just to make sure - from the FNIS mod page "NOTE: It is GENERALLY and STRONGLY recommended, that you DO NOT INSTALL any of Steam, Skyrim, FNIS in folders that are protected by Windows UAC (User Account Control). These are "C:/Program Files (x86)" or "C:/Program Files" (or their localized correspondents, e.g. "C:/Programme (x86)"). Use root folders like "D:\Games". This way you can avoid serious protection issues, especially when using Mod Managers."  I think that you might need to go back and double-check the installation instructions on the mod page.  Maybe the reactivating did not address some fine point.  Once you get every thing ironed out, I suggest that you check out Pandora instead.  Much easier and quicker to use, and installs a dummy plugin for FNIS so that those animations play correctly.

[TheFinaleOfSeem]

Well shoot. Didn't see that. Odd that it installed properly the first time, but not after. I got Pandora installed and it seems to be generating the load of animations that FNIS didn't. Thanks for the tip! As a bonus (though it may be incidental), it might have fixed an issue where saves outside in Solitude or saves where I could step outside into Solitude would crash the game on load, even if all mods were purged.