With so many modders offering their mods as ESM's I need the ability to open and edit the ESM in order to tweak things or just to see what they are doing. However, I cannot figure out how to open an ESM in GECK. The only indications I have found is that they need to be converted to pluggins. I have attempted this using Wrye and also using TES4Gecko. Nevertheless, the GECK freezes and crashes when attempting to open an ESM that has been converted to ESP. No combination of opening dependent masters first seems to work. Could someone point me to a tutorial or give me some pointers on how to do this. I will post this question in the GECK NV forum as well.

Am grateful for any help.

You open the ESM as an ESM, there is no need to convert it. You can then create a plugin (ESP) for that ESM.

If you aleady have too many plugins, and you want the changes in your master, then it should work with the converting to ESP. I never do that so I cant help any more than that.

In order to convert a plugin file to a master file in FO3Edit, follow these steps:

* Open the file that you want to convert in FO3Edit
* Navigate to the file header, right click on Flags and select Edit. When prompted, select Yes I'm absolutely sure
* Toggle the ESM flag, click OK then save your file and exit FO3Edit.

Can be done in FOMM TesSnip as well
You have used Wyre FLASH and convert to esp (usually works, but not always)

I imagine you have already toggled the flag as described (removed it as ESM ) and maybe even renamed it from xxxx.esm to xxx.esp?
Is another master involved?