Quick general question about "easy game file reset"

[Seeker17281]

I did the rare thing and called off at work today to get my Skyrim back in order. I had run into a bit of a issue where a couple of mods I tested had left a permanent and unpleasant game altering footprint which was steadily eroding my game experience. I tried uninstalling them both in NMM, but it didn't do me any good, their game changes continued to haunt me so I figured, uninstall the game, do a clean reinstall. From my experience with Oblivion, I knew this could be rather involved, so some google-fu lead me to this article

 

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615805-/62629651

 

Followed it religiously and had a nice clean re-installed game to work with. This time, I made myself some backup folders for various stages of reinstalling various mods so that should I wind up having a issue in the future, a quick copy/repaste will settle my problem (after a visit to the Steam cloud settings of course). Well, I'm about 6 hours into this rebuild and almost done to where I can start testing some stability again when a buddy at work calls and is poking some fun at me for having called in to do this. He then tells me something that totally blew me away, but I was too far along to test his claim so figured I'd post it here and get some feedback.

 

What he said was, if I have a messed up game install due to mods, all I have to do is go into NMM, uncheck each and every mod I installed, go into the Skyrim data file via the launcher, make sure everything is unchecked, load the game, and once its loaded, do a save. Then quit, go back into NMM, and reinstall the mods I know were good, and I'm gtg. My thinking is, but what happened to all the meshes and textures that may have gotten changed? But he claimed it resets everything to vanilla basics.

 

Like I said, i can't test this as I've already finished my rebuilding from the ground up, but it can't be that easy, can it?

[MotoSxorpio]

That's called a "Clean Save"....and no, its not really all the simple. It can work with some corruption, but the way scripts are handled now, some mods might require extra effort to uninstall. There are a few expert discussions on the subject both here at Nexus and over on Bethesda. If the method you describe above does not work...likely that save is corrupt and not "fixable". In this case, a new game...if your trouble continues even with a freshly started new game, then its not just the save game. Some mods install scripts. If your save game has a call to said script and script is still in your data folder, it does not matter if you even have the mod enabled, in some cases...depending on the script language.