Game stopped working, reinstalled all mods, now it's even worse.

[Fairyhaven13]

I was doing Honest Hearts and the game started crashing every five minutes. I've done that DLC before on another character, and I had Russel with me this time because it was my first go with his mod and I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything--the ending of his main quest suggested there would be more to see in Utah, so I assumed that it meant I needed him to be with me there.

 

I might have been wrong, I don't know, but the point is moot now. I had extra companions in the DLC, and it was constantly crashing, like I would walk five minutes or use fast travel and the game would go "Fallout New Vegas has encountered a problem."

 

So I looked up some stuff and people suggested to reinstall all the mods, just to make sure that none conflicted with the DLC. I started doing that, and ran into more problems. I use Nexus Mod Manager, it's the easiest and simplest thing I've found so far, I don't like having to go through odd archive menu and submenus and whatnot. But, while Nexus usually works just fine, this time it was crashing because it didn't have administrative permission to disable certain folders.

 

So I looked up some more stuff and found out how to gain administrator access on my own computer, logged into the administrator account, and set the FNV Steam Data to uncheck read-only. Going back to my own account, this seemed to do the trick, and I successfully disabled all active mods. I went back and re-enabled them, and some of them apparently borked mid-process because they wouldn't install. So, I completely uninstalled the borked mods (there were only two or three) and re-installed them. All looked fine, just like it had before this whole mess.

 

Then I open up the game to see if it worked better, and it wouldn't open the game at all this time. It starts up that dramatic opening picture, the one before the game menu actually comes up, and then freezes and crashes with another "Fallout New Vegas has encountered a problem." What the heck? I don't even know what I did wrong! If anything, I should have been able to log into the game just fine and gone back to crashing every five minutes, the mods worked perfectly fine before I reinstalled them. From what I know, reinstalling mods is suppose to make them work better. And I didn't do anything different, the only thing that was really a problem was the Yukichigai bug correcter, and when that wouldn't install properly I just deleted it. That was just a bug fixer, not a game overhaul, why would I be having problems now? Can someone please help me with this? I just want to play my game, I don't know what I did wrong. I tried to be so careful.

[dubiousintent]

Did you install Steam to it's default location? If so, please see the wiki "Installing Games on Windows Vista+" article for why the original default Steam behavior of installing games to the "C:\Program Files" folder tree was bad (they learned better, and don't do that any more); and why "disabling UAC and running as Administrator" is NOT sufficient, with instructions how to move it. This is the single most important thing you can do to fix and protect yourself against problems in the future. As much of a PITA as that is, it's never going to be any easier than now. Please see the 'Restoring to "Vanilla"' section of the wiki "FNV General Mod Use Advice" article as well.

If you did move Steam out of the default location, then likely the problem is one of "File and Folder permissions" on the parent "root" folder under which you installed the games. If this is not set correctly to allow at least "System", "Administrators", and "Users" to have "Full Control" then you can't overwrite other files or make changes. You then need to enable the "Properties | Security | Advanced | Change Permissions" setting of the parent folder to enable the box: "Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object", so those changes get applied to the existing files and sub-folders. This is also described in the "Installing Games" article linked previously.

Be aware that one error may mask a number of other errors, which will not appear until those masking them have been resolved. Building a stable game consists of resolving each problem individually until none remain, and then realizing that every change you make thereafter (including updates to mods already installed) run the risk of introducing new problems. First you have to get a stable game setup again.

 

Please see the 'Solutions to Performance problems' and 'Solutions to "Crash To Desktop" (CTD) problems' sections in the wiki "Fallout NV Mod Conflict Troubleshooting" guide.

-Dubious-

[Fairyhaven13]

Did you install Steam to it's default location? If so, please see the wiki "Installing Games on Windows Vista+" article for why the original default Steam behavior of installing games to the "C:\Program Files" folder tree was bad (they learned better, and don't do that any more); and why "disabling UAC and running as Administrator" is NOT sufficient, with instructions how to move it. This is the single most important thing you can do to fix and protect yourself against problems in the future. As much of a PITA as that is, it's never going to be any easier than now. Please see the 'Restoring to "Vanilla"' section of the wiki "FNV General Mod Use Advice" article as well.

 

If you did move Steam out of the default location, then likely the problem is one of "File and Folder permissions" on the parent "root" folder under which you installed the games. If this is not set correctly to allow at least "System", "Administrators", and "Users" to have "Full Control" then you can't overwrite other files or make changes. You then need to enable the "Properties | Security | Advanced | Change Permissions" setting of the parent folder to enable the box: "Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object", so those changes get applied to the existing files and sub-folders. This is also described in the "Installing Games" article linked previously.

 

Be aware that one error may mask a number of other errors, which will not appear until those masking them have been resolved. Building a stable game consists of resolving each problem individually until none remain, and then realizing that every change you make thereafter (including updates to mods already installed) run the risk of introducing new problems. First you have to get a stable game setup again.

 

Please see the 'Solutions to Performance problems' and 'Solutions to "Crash To Desktop" (CTD) problems' sections in the wiki "Fallout NV Mod Conflict Troubleshooting" guide.

 

-Dubious-

 

Thank you so much, I'll start working on your instructions here tomorrow and come back to say how it went. It sounds like it will be a bit before I can play again, but hopefully the effort will lead to fixing the problem! We'll see how it turns out.

[Fairyhaven13]

 

Did you install Steam to it's default location? If so, please see the wiki "Installing Games on Windows Vista+" article for why the original default Steam behavior of installing games to the "C:\Program Files" folder tree was bad (they learned better, and don't do that any more); and why "disabling UAC and running as Administrator" is NOT sufficient, with instructions how to move it. This is the single most important thing you can do to fix and protect yourself against problems in the future. As much of a PITA as that is, it's never going to be any easier than now. Please see the 'Restoring to "Vanilla"' section of the wiki "FNV General Mod Use Advice" article as well.

 

If you did move Steam out of the default location, then likely the problem is one of "File and Folder permissions" on the parent "root" folder under which you installed the games. If this is not set correctly to allow at least "System", "Administrators", and "Users" to have "Full Control" then you can't overwrite other files or make changes. You then need to enable the "Properties | Security | Advanced | Change Permissions" setting of the parent folder to enable the box: "Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object", so those changes get applied to the existing files and sub-folders. This is also described in the "Installing Games" article linked previously.

 

Be aware that one error may mask a number of other errors, which will not appear until those masking them have been resolved. Building a stable game consists of resolving each problem individually until none remain, and then realizing that every change you make thereafter (including updates to mods already installed) run the risk of introducing new problems. First you have to get a stable game setup again.

 

Please see the 'Solutions to Performance problems' and 'Solutions to "Crash To Desktop" (CTD) problems' sections in the wiki "Fallout NV Mod Conflict Troubleshooting" guide.

 

-Dubious-

 

Thank you so much, I'll start working on your instructions here tomorrow and come back to say how it went. It sounds like it will be a bit before I can play again, but hopefully the effort will lead to fixing the problem! We'll see how it turns out.

 

 

 

Did you install Steam to it's default location? If so, please see the wiki "Installing Games on Windows Vista+" article for why the original default Steam behavior of installing games to the "C:\Program Files" folder tree was bad (they learned better, and don't do that any more); and why "disabling UAC and running as Administrator" is NOT sufficient, with instructions how to move it. This is the single most important thing you can do to fix and protect yourself against problems in the future. As much of a PITA as that is, it's never going to be any easier than now. Please see the 'Restoring to "Vanilla"' section of the wiki "FNV General Mod Use Advice" article as well.

 

If you did move Steam out of the default location, then likely the problem is one of "File and Folder permissions" on the parent "root" folder under which you installed the games. If this is not set correctly to allow at least "System", "Administrators", and "Users" to have "Full Control" then you can't overwrite other files or make changes. You then need to enable the "Properties | Security | Advanced | Change Permissions" setting of the parent folder to enable the box: "Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object", so those changes get applied to the existing files and sub-folders. This is also described in the "Installing Games" article linked previously.

 

Be aware that one error may mask a number of other errors, which will not appear until those masking them have been resolved. Building a stable game consists of resolving each problem individually until none remain, and then realizing that every change you make thereafter (including updates to mods already installed) run the risk of introducing new problems. First you have to get a stable game setup again.

 

Please see the 'Solutions to Performance problems' and 'Solutions to "Crash To Desktop" (CTD) problems' sections in the wiki "Fallout NV Mod Conflict Troubleshooting" guide.

 

-Dubious-

 

Okay, so that took much longer than I had originally expected, but it worked! My game is working now, my files are in a safe spot in a completely different folder, and I think things will be okay. Thank you for your help, I would have had no idea about any of this otherwise!

 

For anyone who might stumble across this post and hope for a more detailed explanation of what I did, I'll put the lengthy saga here. Be sure you read what I did above so we'll be on the same page: I activated my administration account on my computer, which was useful in the process for uninstalling/deleting files that had permission limits.

 

The first thing I did was use the link in the above post to make a new Steam folder. I did this slightly wrong at first; my D drive does not have enough space for the games. So, I ended up having to make a folder on an entirely separate part of the C drive. The problem with this is that Steam will not allow you to put two default downloading folders into the same drive. It detected that it already had the Program Files default folder (the bad one that doesn't work well) and so it wouldn't accept my new folder (simply labeled Steam in the Games section of the drive).

 

To fix this, I had to move EVERYTHING out of the main Steam folder and delete it so that it didn't exist anymore. This was a delicate process. I first backed up my files on Steam itself, but I was worried that wouldn't work because it didn't look right (I have no game titled BORDERLANDS AND FALLOUT AND PORTAL AND...etc etc, which is what it decided to label a "single" game folder as. It was weird.) So I also made a big zip file. Like, I selected every little thing in the Steam folder and told it to compress to zip. This took a while, about four hours, and required some Admin permissions, hence my warning from before.

 

Once that was done, I moved it into Games beside the empty, unused Steam folder, and deleted the old Steam folder in Program Files. This was scary for me, since I was terrified I was completely deleting my save files. I'm not really sure how that all works. But, once everything in that folder was deleted and gone, I was able to change the default download in Steam. The problem with this is that I couldn't completely delete the old empty folder--it was still there, full of nothing, because for some reason Admin didn't have enough permission to delete that. To remedy this, I completely uninstalled and reinstalled Steam, and told it from the get-go to download into the Games/Steam folder.

 

Now all the defaults were fixed and Steam was in a not-bad folder, I extracted the zip file into it. This took an hour and a half, or so. I tested it out by opening Borderlands and seeing if my save file was still there. It took a few to find and open the game, since Steam had to use a whole new path, but eventually it did open, and viola, my save files were A-Okay! That was a huge relief.

 

I uninstalled Nexus, since the directions I was using advised reloading all mods so that the vanilla Fallout could register the new folder and stuff, and then tried to open the vanilla game. Boo! It was still crashing on startup. I took a glance into the folder and found out that, no, it was not vanilla like I thought. Despite uninstalling Nexus, the files were all still integrated into the game files, I could see some of the esp.'s there. Since I have no idea how to go deep into the code and go, "oh, hey, that's not a default texture" and delete things individually, I ended up selecting all Fallout NV folders and completely deleting them from my computer. Another scary moment where I was afraid for my save files.

 

I then reinstalled Fallout (after clicking "uninstall" just to make sure Steam knew it wasn't there anymore) and tried reopening the game. It still crashed. But, this time, I had an idea of what to do. When I first got the game, it did the same thing, and I had to find an online fix. The fix for me was validating the files through Steam, getting it to register that there was 1 missing file (as usual), restarting Steam, uninstalling Fallout again and then reinstalling it again, validating again, and then restarting Steam again to make sure it registered everything I've done. This part might not work for everyone, everyone has to do something different for that first time, be it opening as Administrator (which I did from the file itself after restarting Steam) or using funky Admin codes or what have you. The point here is, once you have the vanilla, not-modded game in the new folder, just do what you did the first time you installed NV and it acted funky. Hopefully it should work for you.

 

This time, wonder of wonders, the game loaded and let me go into New Game. Woo! It even showed me my load files in the menu. I didn't dare click on one, since I had none of the mods for it, but they were there. So then came the lengthy task of reinstalled Nexus, setting it for the new not-bad Games folder, and reinstalling all my mods. This took a couple of hours. A little longer than before, too, because I added a couple stabilizing fixer mods, to be safe. Some of the mods had been updated or switched around since I last used them, and so when I finally loaded my actual save, it was a little different.

 

The main things I noticed after playing a bit were: my Courier's hair was different (understandable, the hair mod had updated and so the code for her hair might have been cycled around to another style. Not a biggie, I can change it at a hair stylist or with cheats later), my Vulpes companion was gone (a little weird, but also not a real big deal, since I hadn't given him much gear aside from what he came with and I'm assuming he'll just be reset at Goodsprings waiting for me, since I definitely added the mod back in), and the gear that I had earned from New Vegas Bounties I and New Bison Steve was gone (that was rather disappointing, since I loved that duster and gun and it means all my trophies at Buck's place that I'd laid out are probably gone too, but it shows the quests as complete in my log, so at least I don't have to redo them.)

 

I was mostly okay with these things, because it was just due to reinstalling the game and mods, and it wasn't game-breaking, and whenever I make a new character later it'll be a smooth transition, and also my saves were still there so this was waaaay better than having to start all over. I'm just glad I can play again.

 

I hope that this help some people out there. I know I probably did some things wonky or backwards since I'm no computer expert, but it worked out in the end. Thanks again for the help!

Edited October 26, 2017 by Fairyhaven13