Can anyone help me? I have a 46 skill in Marksman but have a -44 against it, leaving 2. This mean all my bows and arrows cause 2 damage! I am level 10 and have 72 in agility, so can anyone tell me what's going on and possibly how to fix it?

Thanks in advance!

Sounds like you contracted a disease or multiple ones, what you do is go to a chapel and pray or if your character is devious youll have to buy restore potions.

I have no disease, or I would not have posted. I forgot about the temple, but I am thinking something has gone wrong with wherever the data is held for skills,.

this is kind of weird, I checked on the uesp and it said that no form of skill restoration exists in the game because no form of skill damaging exists. Skills can only be absorbed or drained, which are both temporary. In addition there is no apparel in the game or any DLC that drains marksman. The only possible explanation I can think of is that you've been getting hit by a spell weapon or poison with drain marksman and somehow it became permanent. If you haven't already, try a potion/spell for cure poison or dispel. If that doesn't work then I have no idea whats causing it.

Thanks for the help guys. Will try what you say and then probably either re-install or give up on the game, as I am fed up with problems popping up like this!

What platform are you on?

If you're on PC then use the console to restore the skill;

I tired that very thing this morning as the church didn't work, nor a dispel spell or a cure disease, etc.

Believe it or not, the console cheat didn't work either! I entered "Player.SetAV Marksman 46" and the console accepted it and made no difference!

It's only Marksman that afftected, non of my other skills are changed (other than enchanted items, etc), nor my attributes! Very weird indeed!

Did you try ModPcs marksman 44?

Not 100% sure but setAv will compile but not change the value since marksman is already being stored at 46. You could also use debug in the console to list all current magic effects on the player;

sdt 8
tdt

See if there is anything in the list that looks off.

Thanks for the help. Nothing is off in the magical effects. But I have run the game with just Oblivion.esm and it's still there! This means it cannot be a mod or something I am wearing can it?

What are you wearing?

For example in SI there is a amulet (and bit of a challenge to get it) it Disintegrate your armour and weapon to zero.

Just go to effects tab.

If its a game glitch have you try the http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=9969

I am only level 10 and haven't gone to SI. I have checked what I was wearing and checked via console via the post above and nothing was wrong. My armour is just Mithiral with no enchantments on them. I only have the horse armour mod, none of the others and the unofficial official mod patch didn't change anything.

I am at a total loss as to what is bringing my Marksman skill down by 44, just to say it's nothing in game that is checkable (diseases, enchantments, poisons, etc) all of which are checkable in game.It cannot be an in-game problem as no Dispel clears it as it should. If this info is data held in a file then that file has got corrupted, but in a very strange specific way!

Thanks for the help though - always appreciated!

That means the corrupted data is in your save game file. I believe there are utilities that can edit an .ess file. I have never done it myself so I'll let someone else handle speculate on whether that will help.

When you say the UOP changes nothing, Do you mean you installed the UOP and nothing changed? To fix stats you need to open your inventory and scroll down to "misc" and look for a UOP options? or access the UOP Options inside of the Cobl options. If you select the correct option you will be told to exit the inventory menu. You will see a box pop-up shortly after exiting your inventory for the UOP. You need to select Restore broken stats/attributes to bring up another menu where you should be able to fix the Skill drain. If this does not work, then you have a bad save and need to start over.
Wrye Bash has an Import Face option in the Saves tab to use the face for another saved game. You can use Conslole Commands to modify an older clean save if you are too aggravated to replay the quests again.

Yeah, it does sound like a corrupt file. 44 is a insanely high number.

Do you have an earlier save that you can reload?

Want to say a H U G E thanks to all for your help guys! I reinstalled Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine from the second disk, then reinstalled the Unofficial Oblivion patch. This time when I fixed stats it worked! I now have 47 in Marksman skills and my bow/arrow damage has gone up consequently!

Don;t know why UOP didn't do anything before. And I reinstalled SI/Knights to replace the Oblivion.esm, which I was beginning to the think was the problem, and then based on comments above I had UOP on my mind so re-installed it (even though I had the latest version), tried it again and this time it fixed the problem!

Thanks everyone for the suggestions and help. Every single post has been useful and I really want to thank you guys! You're all stars!

One thing that often changes in a re-install is load order. I'd guess that something was overriding the UOP's fix stats capability before. Recommend you run BOSS to get your load order consistent, so it doesn't come back and haunt you.

Thanks for that info, but I did that based on advice from someone else and it didn't work. And given I have a working game, i'll leave it alone for a while rather than tempt fate...!