Frequent CTD's and Refreshing Ini crashes Skyrim

[FutureVisions]

Hello everyone, like the title says, I've started having frequent ctd's while simply roaming the countryside.

This has only started happening today alongside some major fps drops. I've played the game since day one and, luckly for me, so far I had never had stability problems with skyrim until now. Even when I pushed the graphics settings I'd get low fps but no major variations and certainly almost no ctd's.

Yesterday I've updated both the game with the latest patch and my video card drivers and played normally after that. However today after updating some old mods and installing some new ones (based on the S.T.E.P. compilation) I started having these huge fps drops (and I mean HUGE - When the game doesnt crash i've seen it drop to 0.3 fps) and eventually it WILL crash after about every 5 mins or less.

I've already tried lowering graphics settings, removing landscape mods, reverting drivers, removing and reinstalling the mods I've installed today, forcing the recreation of new ini's....etc.

Nothing solved the problem. I'm starting to get inclined to it being a save game corruption, however those usually dont even load up and mine does, at least for now.

Another thing about these crashes is that they occur without any kind of error message either from the game itself or windows, I'm running around and then BAM I'm on desktop.

 

Another thing I wanted to try was to revert back the "uGridstoload" setting to the original value (I've had it set at 7 for a while and never had a problem - but I'm trying everything) and whenever I try to refresh the ini from the console I get an immediate CTD, again without any error message. Which makes me think these things might be related.

 

The problem is I don't have a clue of what could be causing this command to crash the game (and btw I've had used it several times before and it never caused a ctd).

 

So if anyone has any idea of what might be causing the "silent" CTD's or the "Refreshini" CTD's I'd appreciate the help, because I'm running out of ideas. Next step is unnistalling+reinstalling all the mods + the game. Not to mention testing them one by one......

Edited December 25, 2011 by FutureVisions

[FutureVisions]

Bump.

So no idea on why refreshing ini from in-game would make it crash?

[LMahesa]

Does it do the same when you're indoors?

 

 

[Rombbb]

Had exactly same issue, SUPERRRRR annoying. But found the cause; when changing updating ini's sometimes Skyrim creates one in your default ini folder called custom ini or something like that. Remove that one. I remembered that from a while back and thought all was peachy again but then BAMMMM back to desktop again :)

So after couple of hours I was really like feeling like an idiot and wanting to give up, but then it remembered it, Bingo, Skyrim for some reason also makes a ini on its own in your Data folder. Easy to miss as it's all the way to the bottom and out of sight in default folder view but anyways, delete that one too and you should be all set to slay some more dragons again :)

[whogoods]

I also ran across this today when following the instructions for reverting back to ugridstoload=5. It turns out that after the latest patch those instructions aren't valid anymore. Another user from this forum figured it out

 

http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/490666-patch-13-vs-ugridstoload/page__p__4013601#entry4013601

 

and some more discussion about the issue here,

 

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2278311

 

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=26929854&postcount=31

[Rabbit1251]

Had exactly same issue, SUPERRRRR annoying. But found the cause; when changing updating ini's sometimes Skyrim creates one in your default ini folder called custom ini or something like that. Remove that one. I remembered that from a while back and thought all was peachy again but then BAMMMM back to desktop again :)

So after couple of hours I was really like feeling like an idiot and wanting to give up, but then it remembered it, Bingo, Skyrim for some reason also makes a ini on its own in your Data folder. Easy to miss as it's all the way to the bottom and out of sight in default folder view but anyways, delete that one too and you should be all set to slay some more dragons again :)

I believe that Default ini is important. It is used when Skyrim needs to recreate your game ini from scratch. Without it if you manage to screw up your game ini you're sunk.

 

 

Rabbit

[whogoods]

Had exactly same issue, SUPERRRRR annoying. But found the cause; when changing updating ini's sometimes Skyrim creates one in your default ini folder called custom ini or something like that. Remove that one. I remembered that from a while back and thought all was peachy again but then BAMMMM back to desktop again :)

So after couple of hours I was really like feeling like an idiot and wanting to give up, but then it remembered it, Bingo, Skyrim for some reason also makes a ini on its own in your Data folder. Easy to miss as it's all the way to the bottom and out of sight in default folder view but anyways, delete that one too and you should be all set to slay some more dragons again :)

I believe that Default ini is important. It is used when Skyrim needs to recreate your game ini from scratch. Without it if you manage to screw up your game ini you're sunk.

 

 

Rabbit

 

Not really, you can have Steam verify the integrity of the game and once it notices it missing it will redownload it. Did it a couple times today trying to figure out the cause of my crashes.

[FutureVisions]

Thx for the feedback guys. But I already solved it.

I also had a problem a while back because of reverting ugridstoload and had to delete the customprefs ini then so I didnt had it any more when this problem started to happen.

Had to solve my problem by reinstalling and recreating new inis and then tweaking those -.-

I found out that lowering the shadow settings from the launcher solved the frequent CTD problem even though the shadows had always worked well on high settings. So I'm guessing something might have gone corrupt with the shadow settings in the inis. Reinstalling worked for me in this case.

 

About the problem with reverting the ugridstoload to 5. I had the same problem like I mentioned. in that case the in-game process didnt work because of the file you mentioned. you either have to change both inis directly with the game windowed and then refreshing the ini in.game, or delete the customprefs.ini and do it normally.

Edited January 7, 2012 by FutureVisions

[egamar]

So I'm guessing something might have gone corrupt with the shadow settings in the inis. Reinstalling worked for me in this case.

I doubt your guess is correct unless you'd unwisely tweaked the shadow settings beyond what is sensible. Reinstalling cures a MULTITUDE of ills, and I doubt the shadow settings were the cause of the problems - reinstalling cured the REAL cause of the problems you just don't know what they were ....

 

About the problem with reverting the ugridstoload to 5. I had the same problem like I mentioned. in that case the in-game process didnt work because of the file you mentioned. you either have to change both inis directly with the game windowed and then refreshing the ini in.game, or delete the customprefs.ini and do it normally.

 

That is nonsense, sorry. Read the excellent tweakguide on geforce.com to learn how to PROPERLY recover from messing about with ugridstoload.

 

Bad advice is worse than no advice. Guessing is probably worse than even bad advice ...