After searching extensively, I found posts where many players experienced this bug...in 2012 and 2013. Nothing recent, at least that I found.

I've had the "Speak to the Leader of the Companions" quest since I was, maybe level 5 or so. I'm a year into the game (with a 5 month hiatus to play FO4), and am now level 70. Time to start at the bottom and clear out some miscellaneous quests, right?

I head into Jorvaskarr and downstairs to talk to Koldak. All the Companions are hostile and attack me on sight. Reading the huge amount of posts about this same problem when the game first released, I'll get some things out of the way:

I entered Jorvaskarr alone, without followers.

I am crime-free in Whiterun.

I am not now, and have never been, a vampire or a werewolf. I have killed lots of vampires. Not sure about werewolves, but probably one or two as part of another quest, maybe? At any rate, that should not have caused this issue, from what I can learn about the factions involved in the CK.

I *think* this started over by Riften a few days ago. There is a farm west of Riften with a Troll spawn nearby. As myself and 3 followers were riding by, we wound up in a fight. I thought it was just the troll spawn, but it turned out to be Athis and Vilgnar (sp?) with the Companions. Neither myself or my followers are using AOE spells, but it's possible they got in the way of an arrow or a Thunderbolt spell. Hard to tell, since they were mostly invisible due to a bug caused by a Havok hair mod bug.

Anyone have a solution on how to fix this? I'm not even sure what caused it! I could probably console a faction command, but I'm afraid that would irretrievably break the Companions quest line. It's not a huge deal. It's been sitting in my quest journal for over a year, so it's not a game-breaker for me. Still, if I can fix it, I would like to.

Thank for any help

When I had a similar problem I had to go to every hold and offer to pay fines even though I didn't think I had a criminal record anywhere.

I saw another post where someone had used a console command to pay a non-existent fine directly to the Companions characters that were attacking them, and this apparently fixed it for them. Console command is something like "paycrimegold 0 0" with the hostile NPC targetted in the console, IIRC. I had 2 bounties listed in my Crime stats yesterday. 40 gold in Whitehold and 1 gold in the Pale.

Something weird is that I am still running into Companions in other areas that are not hostile to me. Ran into one up close to Winterhold that fired the dialogue that starts the "Speak to the leader of the Companions" quest (Quest ID C00, stage 10). That may be because I've removed the quest with "stopquest C00". I haven't been back to Jorvaskarr to see if this has made a difference with those NPC's. At any rate, I just TAB'ed out of the conversation to keep the quest out of my journal...for now. When Koldar and the rest were attacking me in the Jorvaskarr living quarters, "sqs C00" showed the quest stage to be at 10, and it was listed in my journal under Miscellaneous.

I paid off the Winterhold bounty after I encountered the NPC noted above. That just leaves the one in the Pale, which is a very weird one. Not sure what I did to earn a 1 gold bounty. Maybe I frowned at someone, LOL. At any rate, I'm going to see if I can clear that and then check Jorvaskarr again.

I'll post back as I learn more. Thanks for the help