What would I rename them to? Just anything?

EDIT 1: Supreme Magicka and its ilk are gone. rebashed. no change.

EDIT 2: Removed Ruined Tail's Tale and Mighty Umbra. rebash. no result.

Yes, just anything. It sounds like something you installed replaced a vanilla mesh and the game is unable to load because of it. Renaming the mesh folder at the very least will tell us if the problem is that, or if it lies elsewhere. Finding the corrupt mesh is an entirely different story of course.

Okay, will try that Arthmoor.

Last attempt: Unchecked Lock Bash Omega, removed TNR from bashed patch, and got rid of esms I am no longer using. Rebashed. No change.

Renaming my mesh and textures folders now...

EDIT!!!!!!!
OMG Arthmoor. Genius. Started right up. cinematic, chargen, everything! Didn't even crash upon exit (like it usually does)

....

So how do we go about finding this corrupted mesh? or is a reinstall needed?

Well, narrowing it down is going to be tedious, but not impossible. Rename the folder back to meshes, but this time go in the meshes folder and one by one rename each subfolder until you stop the crash. Since it's dying at the beginning of the game, my first guess would be to rename Meshes\Characters to something else.

Well, you're at least partially right. The renamed Characters folder allows the Cinematic to play, but crashes (with a message) right after but before chargen.

Could we be dealing with more than one corrupt mesh here?

The absolute best way to be sure it's all because of a corrupt mesh is to load only Oblivion.esm and the official DLCs and if you're still getting the crash that's all it could be. Having more than one corrupt mesh would certainly svck but it could happen.

Deactivated everything but the official expansion mods. And the unofficial patches for them (except KotN, o'course. thats been deactivated for a while)

I'm encountering the same thing though. crash (with message) following cinematic.

EDIT:

No crash after renaming the Creatures folder! So now I'm going to rename the Karacters folder back to Characters and see what happens

EDIT2:

Nope! crashes before cinematic. Looks like a corrupt mesh lies in both folders

EDIT3:

Interesting. I've isolated the corrupt mesh in the Characters folder to the _1stPerson folder.
However, upon entering the game, all they eyes are glowing....like spectacularly. I suspect this hints at something, but I'm not sure what. Corrupt eye textures maybe? A connection to RBP? I know that mod was supposed to add glowing variants of eyes, but I've never gotten them to work. With RBP deactivated, of course, there is only the four/three eye colors. But boy do they sure glow!

Going to narrow the creature folder corrupt mesh next.

EDIT4:

Identified the corrupt creatures folder: Skeleton


Now for the textures folder....

EDIT5: Well, renamed the Textures folder "Textures" again, and the glowy eye syndrome disapeered. No idea why. The blue eye color is a lot...duller than I remember it. Almost gray.

---

Okay, well, I'll await further instruction on what to do about those corrupt meshes, and hope we can identify what exactly corrupted them.

Well, the _1stperson folder is brimming with animation files. Have you installed any animation mods lately?

Same with creatures. Any creature mods get installed lately?

This is an area where having done all of your installs via BAIN is incredibly helpful. You should be able to go to the installers tab and look at the packages you have left installed and see which ones put stuff in either of the two folders you're having trouble with. Assuming you didn't remove things manually that is.

Nope, unless it came bundled with one of the mods I installed. I'll look through them later today. Right now this is the only thing in the _1stPerson folder

dynamicidle_sit



Yep. MMM, and I'm quite sure many of my mods have modded creatures in them. Again, I'll look around later.
These are the three files in the skeleton folder.

BHelmet
helmetlich
SKDBCuirass

EDIT: Did a quick browsing around. Evidently, the helmetlich file had its origins in The Dark Tower. (A mod that I had initially installed, but upon rechecking the tesnexus page, found that it conflicted with heart of the dead. It was deactivated before I began the OP.

dynamicidle_sit is one of the standard animation files, so something you installed came with a replacement version of it. If that's still causing issues you should be able to remove it. I'd copy the file and set it aside for now in case you run into something that's not working properly as far as NPCs being able to sit on things.

I don't know why those 3 files in the skeleton folder would lead to the game crashing at the start unless someone added skeletons to the prison level that use those files.

I looked around for any mod that might of made a replacement for it(the dynamicidle), but I could find nothing. I'll try removing it and the helmetlich file to see if those two are the ones.

Well, evidently, every file in the skeleton folder is corrupt. Tried a couple of different combos but i get a crash just the same. But as far as I found, only Dark Tower touches the Meshes/creatures/skeleton folder. So maybe its a source to all my problems?

I'm starting to think I should just do a reinstall and leave out Dark Tower. See if that solves my problems. No idea about the animation though. My reasoning is if Dark Tower did corrupt my skeleton meshes, chances are it corrupted the animation. The mod did add animations, but as far as I could tell never touched Meshes/Characters/_1stPerson.

EDIT: Maybe I should play through the beginning dungeon to see if there are any skeletons? I know there is the 'dead' one. Maybe that's why it crashes upon start up?

bump

If the dead one is using those meshes and they're corrupt, then yes, it would cause the game to crash.

Is there a way to repair these corrupt meshes to avoid reinstall?

Possibly, but you'd be getting beyond my knowledge of things since you're dealing with a rigged mesh ( the helmet ) and an animation file. If you can play without the files in place, I'd suggest doing so and then address it if you ever see missing mesh icons somewhere.

Okay, well, thank you very much Arthmoor. I really, truly do appreciate the help. And your mods...quite amazing!

Hard to express my gratitude enough... :hugs:

Both you and Tomlong do a lot on these forums to help, and it is far under-appreciated.

Thanks again!

I just wanted to add my praises to TomLong and Arthmoor too. They're incredibly patient and always willing to help. Bethesda should hire them as community managers