So what's the best way to clean everything and start vanilla afresh? Beyond deleting Skyrim in common and the .txt documents in My Games is there anything else to get rid of?

I'm very OCD on this as I always fear to mess things up.

Thanks.

Your not clear in what you want. Do you want to remove any mods that you have and leave the base game behind? Or, do you want to have a clean directory to reinstall the game into?

Edit It sounds like the latter, so, run the Uninstaller, then tell Steam to Delete Local Content, then, go and find the Skyrim Directory in Steam and My Games and delete those folders.

Now, some mod managers will put their archives and mod files in the game's root install directory. Those are clearly denoted and you may want to move those someplace until after you have reinstalled the game, then put them back so the mod managers can use them and you don't have to download the mod again.

Now that I think about it, I'd like to know about both the options.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1381322-want-to-do-a-proper-uninstallreinstall/

Read my post again.

That doesn't do a full purge. You're leaving in the load order list as well. It's best to purge everything to be safe.

So it seems that's the most common and best way across the internet then. Thanks!