Hello everyone. I must say that, while I'm not entirely new to the ES modding community as a whole, I am rather new to Oblivion's modding scene. I do, however, understand basic troubleshooting, and have followed as many tutorials as possible to solve the issue I will be discussing here. I have also been unable to locate any adequate information about this elsewhere, which is why I am asking.
Spoiler
Before I go into details as to what I've done, however, it's probably a good idea to tell you all what exactly the issue is. I own Oblivion on both disk and Steam. I cannot currently use my disk version (I can't find the disk atm), and the CS is installed to the Steam Oblivion GotY directory. I run Win 10, x64 bit processor (I'm not going to list my specs, because I doubt they are important for this. I'm merely listing that its Win 10 and Steam, which may play a small part in this issue. It might also not, because the issue is not consistent.), Oblivion and the Construction Set are patched to the latest version from Bethesda themselves (well, I'm assuming the Steam version is. It's always reported as such whenever I look at the update information, and it runs SI and all DLC, so...). Oblivion runs without a hitch, and loads all DLC on Ultra-High settings without any difficulty or reference of error, and I never recieve any while playing. This leads me to believe that the issue is tied to my installation of the CS.
Oops, I guess I got a little carried away there -- the issue is that the CS will crash when saving or creating a mod with Knights of the Nine or Frostcrag Spire selected, but not listed as the "Active Mod," corrupting the saved .esp. On an interesting note, attempting to do save with the other DLC (Shivering Isles, Battlehorn Castle, Vile Lair, Spell Tomes, Mehrune's Razor, and Thieve's Den) it saves perfectly fine, and I am able to continue working on the mod. Now, this in and of itself wouldn't be too big of a problem if I wasn't trying to make a DLC delaying mod for all the DLC... but I digress: this problem has royally stumped me for almost two whole days now.
Okay, so if you've read the spoiler, you'll remember that the issue lays in Frostcrag Spire and Knights of the Nine DLCs. What I've done so far for troubleshooting is this:
1. Determine which plugins are causing issues. I've tested all of them by saving a dummy .esp with them loaded, and the only two which crashed are Frostcrag and KotN.
2. Because I saw that they were the problematic DLC, I deleted them and reinstalled them. (I even did it with all DLC) No luck there.
3. I figured that it may be an issue with the CS, so I ran it as an admin, under 4 different compatibility settings (from XP to win8), until I finally got to the point where I decided it might help if I uninstalled it. I did, and used CCleaner to remove its registry settings completely, then reinstalled it and tried again. Same. Exact. Results.
4. When that didn't work, I completely uninstalled Oblivion and the CS, deleted everything from the Oblivion folder and steam that was left over, and the Oblivion folder in the My Documents/Games folder, and used CCleaner to remove any residual registry settings from Oblivion. I then reinstalled Oblivion GotY and the CS ONLY, getting the same results.
5. I attempted a workaround with TES4Edit, where I added Frostcrag (I also tried with Knights) as a master for a correctly saved plugin, booted it up in the CS and tried to save -- still crashed.
6. I tried googling everything. I still haven't been able to find my problem, and I've tried messing with a bunch of setting (such as enabling/disabling autosave), but it crashes for Frostcrag and KotN whenever it autosaves.
I know that, because I'm new, there's probably a rather simple trick to solving this -- be it an .ini setting or some silly thing I hadn't seen, but I haven't found any answer to my problems, and quite frankly it's really upsetting me. I'm not getting anything back from the editor, either: there isn't a single text file which appears, showing what might be wrong. It simply crashes. I haven't tested it on the disk version (as I said, it's currently unavailable to me right now), and Oblivion is currently saved to C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Oblivion (I've done a bit of modding for Morrowind, and I figured the Program Files would be an issue for Oblivion as well). What puzzles me most is that it is able to load KotN and Frostcrag, but not save them, though it will load and save any other DLC/Plugin that is not dependant on them whatsoever. There is only one thing that bothers me, and it is that LOOT provides me with the error "Cannot read "DLCFrostcrag.esp". Details: ios_base::failbit set: iostream stream error", though it gives me the same error for all my DLC, and several Plugins. This causes LOOT to spout back at me when a mod depends on it, saying that it "isn't active" (though it quite obviously is). I don't know why it does it, but it's probably because it's Steam or Win 10.
Anyways, any and all help is appreciated. I'm really tired and bummed out about this, so I'm heading off to bed for now. I'd upload my .esps for you to see what I mean, but I'm pretty sure that's not legal, so... :/
Thanks for reading, and please, if you know anything, share it! Even if it doesn't work, it still may be a step in the right direction :3
Oh, and happy 4th, USA