Skyrim SE Creation Kit crash

[charlesm80]

Searched everywhere, can't find a situation quite like mine.
One day, the Creation Kit was working, the next day it wasn't. Splash screen comes up, the main window is visible, it gets to "initializing archive" for a few seconds, and then it just closes itself. No messages, just gone. (Up until here, the problem seems relatively common.)

Tried some ini edits I found online... no change.
Tried removing all mods... no change.

Copied the entire Skyrim folder to my secondary drive in case I mess up on my next attempts. Tried to run creation kit from there and it worked.

So at least I have a workaround. Move everything, make changes, move back. But I'd like to solve the problem.
Probably something to do with being on the same drive as my OS. Maybe a Win10 update is causing it to be blocked?

Any ideas?

Thanks


Update, before someone chimes in with the easy ones:
-disabling firewall does not work
-disabling anti-virus does not work
-running as administrator does not work

[charlesm80]

If anyone else has this problem, here's what I found (after trying half a dozen other "solutions"):

CK is calling a Win10 DLL file (likely recursively), feeding it a mod path as a variable.
Win 10, and many other microsoft products, has a known issue with long paths. It fails at ~260 characters. Oddly, it's not 256, it's actually defined at 260.
Some mod I had installed ran past the limit when it was in the standard steam location: "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\"
but it was not over the limit when I copied it all to:
"D:\Skyrim Special Edition\"
that's why it worked on my secondary drive but not my primary drive.
Uninstalling the mod from Vortex did not work because Vortex leaves the empty folder structure and CK still tries to look in those folders.

TLDR:
-Go to your Data folder, do a search for *.* to list everything
-Expand the "Folder" column as far as you can
-Scroll through the list looking for any that look extraordinarily long
-Go uninstall that mod
-Go back and delete the empty folders

Alternatively, to work on other mods, you could just manually relocate that mod temporarily and then put it back when your done.

Now I might actually go look at some guides to see if there's a simple way to restructure a mod.