Think I'm running into some trouble with correctly installing the official hi-res texture packs via Mod Organizer.

I discovered recently that I'd been running Skyrim without the hi-res packs for some reason, so the other day I downloaded them via Steam and opened up MO.

On the left-hand side of MO, which lists all the esms and plugins, the hi-res packs were listed at the top; they didn't have the option of being 'checked' or un-checked.

On the right-hand side, in the tab that lists esps, I saw that the hi-res packs could be 'checked' (i.e. activated). But mousing over the check-box revealed a message that said these were just dummies and I should instead activate them in the 'archives' tab.

So I did that for one of my MO profiles, the one my wife plays. Almost immediately she noticed heavy crashes and texture errors upon entering new cells.

I went back into her profile, unchecked the texture packs, and things seem to be running fine now.

Of course, I'd like to have the packs working. What do I need to do here? Thanks for any ideas.

tl;dr - thought I installed the hi-res texture packs correctly with MO, but encountered lots of crashes and texture problems.

I dunno much about MO, but FWIW don't use MO as a mod manager. So if you want to use the official Hi-Res Texture Pack then uninstall MO and start using Wrye Bash.

There's nothing wrong with MO. I'm using it with a heavily modded Skyrim and have no issues. There's definitely a higher learning curve than for NMM, but that's true for Wrye Bash as well. Reading/Watching a tutorial is highly recommended! The official guide can be found here: http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:Mod_Organizer

The top of the left pane should look like this, it's really important to place the Unofficial Skyrim Patch before any DLC, if present:

- Unofficial Skyrim Patch

- Dawnguard

- Unofficial Dawnguard Patch

- HearthFires

- Unofficial Hearthfire Patch

- Dragonborn

- Unofficial Dragonborn Patch

- HighResTexturePack01

- HighResTexturePack02

- HighResTexturePack03

- Unofficial High Resolution Patch

The top of the plugins tab in the right pane should look like this:

- Skyrim.esm

- Update.esm

- Unofficial Skyrim Patch.esp

- Dawnguard.esm

- Unofficial Dawnguard Patch.esp

- HearthFires.esm

- Unofficial Hearthfire Patch.esp

- Dragonborn.esm

- Unofficial Dragonborn Patch.esp

- (all other esm files)

- HighResTexturePack01.esp (can be unchecked)

- HighResTexturePack02.esp (can be unchecked)

- HighResTexturePack03.esp (can be unchecked)

- Unofficial High Resolution Patch (can be unchecked)

- (all other esp files)

The HighRes Texture packs are just bsa files. Usually the game needs a plugin to activate them. This is why there are those dummy plugins. With MO you can deactivate the plugins to save some esp slots, but you don't have to. It's up to you. If you don't have a lot of mods you can leave them checked in the right pane. If you uncheck them, make sure the bsa files are checked in the Archives tab.