My boyfriend has just started a new playthrough of Skyrim (with mods) on his new computer and it has been running fine until this evening. He can't make new save games (however the game still autosaves). We're running through SKSE but the (have tried running as an administrator but nothing has changed).

When we make a new save it says saving, and quits out the menu as usual, but then it disappears from the load/save list. Overwriting a save game seems to delete it from the list. The saved games do seem to still appear in the documents folder of the computer.

Turning off Steam Sync seemed to work (as one save file was created), but then stopped working after that. Any ideas?

(also, as I've never had this problem, so don't know much about the extensions on save files, the extensions are .ess.tmp rather than .ess - is this causing the problem? What could cause the files to be saved as this rather than .ess?)

Yes that's a problem.

You cannot load from tmp files. I suggest you delete those. Then, you only try saves with an .ess extension. Try that. If those are corrupted, you can try going back further....

If your saves not working at all, personally I would start a clean install, new game, no mods.

After that, when you add mods or other changes, I'd suggest to do so slowly, run BOSS and check to be sure its all working before continuing. If a problem arises don't do anything until you fix it or you will just end up with a bunch of bad saves.

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Quicksaves and autosaves are notorious for becoming corrupt. I suggest you may avoid this problem entirely in the future if you train yourself to make full saves often and disable the quick save/autosave.

Yeah, we figured that was a cause, do you have any idea what is causing the .tmp files to be made? He only makes full saves, no quicksaves.

In most cases, these .tmp files are partial files used to gather the information needed to make the full file. Kind of like when you download a media file, you have a partial file until you get all the content. Not sure if Skyrim does this.

Does he have any mods that automatically create saves along the way? Is the Saves folder set to Read Only?

Not that I can think of, he has the Live Another Life mod but obviously that only creates saves at the start of the game (and I've never had an issue with this mod on my computer). Afaik the save folder is not read only, as when he creates new save files they are added to the folder, just as .tmp files, and when the .tmp extension is removed the save files are restored.

EDIT: So we restarted the computer and it started working for a few minutes then stopped again. I decided to look at the save game folder and it was set to read only, I changed it so it wasn't set to read only, however this didn't fix the problem.

We also tried making a new character but it had the same issues. Sigh.

Was the folder initially not Read Only, then gets set to Read Only?

Is there any security software installed like Norton or others that are active in the background when playing the game? Perhaps they are interpreting for some reason changes to the save folder as an issue.