So when using console to view inventory I notice this. I see this on every character with starte equipment. Followers and apparently the pc in the intro. It only seems to affect starting armor for some dumb reason, but nobody i in any other forum or site I've been to sems to know what causes it. I've heard high fps, load order change and other stuff as causes but I honestly don't think that can be right can it?. I need something definitive for fixing this issue cause as it stands I't's affecting even vanilla followers with starte quipment.

Using the console to remove them doesn't help it temporarily fixes the issue but we need to get to the rot and that why it is returning this bad editor id.

Does it actually say "Bad Editor ID" ?

yea it does. I didn't have this problem before though I believe. Though honestly i never used console commands like inv until recently. I know i didn't have this issue cuz i could remove the starter clothing for every follower mod. Now not one of the starter clothing the stuff they wear prior to enlisting seems to work andisn't viewable by any means opening their container. Armor that isn't initially worn but armor that's in their inventory seems to work fine however.

Call me crazy but either you got a mod that has borked Skyrim.ESM out to the woozy, or I donno, you're saying vanilla forms have bad editor IDs, that sounds like a master file issue.

Does this happen on a brand new character/no mods, etc ?

From what I understand only initial equipment for both followers and pc seem to be affected, all other equipment isn't. This applies only to equipment that is worn initially, with the apparent exclusion of weapons from what other people have said. With no mods installed there are in fact bad editor ids. I'm apparently not the only one with this issue either. I use mod organizer and installed a bunch of mods but excluded them from being loaded does that count?

The mods I use shouldn't be having that kind of effect on skyrim.esm, in fact all the mods i'm using right now are the same one's i've used for a long time. A fire and ice overhaul i had forced me to completely reinstall skyrim. I also got rid of all save and mods made a list of what i had and went from there. If there's any issues with skyrim now it may be bethesda's fault. I've heard their patches can be bad and require a patch to fix the patch. I usually don't believe such internet rumors but ever since reinstalling skyrim i've had this issue.

Ive noticed that the bad editor id armors disapear when something is equipped. An example is bad id boots. If you have followers equip something better, the item in question disappears, but the moment you unequip those better boots the bad editor id equipment comes back.

It has to do with outfits I believe, which is what determines what an NPC wears by default. For example an Imperial soldier will have all the various pieces of Imperial armor in their default outfit list so that they will equip it when the game spawns that NPC. I'm not certain how the engine handles the FormIDs internally but it may be that since the items are spawned and equipped via the outfit system that the inventory command can't retrieve the proper IDs for the equipment from the game data when loading in the items. It should have no real affect on the game since as you've noted even base NPCs in the unmodded game will show the Bad IDs if you check them so this may be an engine bug that was never deemed important enough to patch.

Did you validate the game files through Steam to make sure nothing got corrupted?