In my latest run of Skyrim, I decided to try to do STEP - Skyrim Revisited, Legendary Edition, plus Requiem. I am using Mod Organizer and not NMM.

What I am seeing is as follows - by FPS/Stutter is fine. Game is smooth, but load times, from actually starting the game, to zoning, even minor zoning like going into an interior in a town, the load times are outrageously long. More than that, My cursor actually changes to the windows blue circle thing, and if I alt-tab to Task Manager, I see that Skyrim is not responsive. Eventually, it the game finishes zoning and all is well.

I thought maybe my disk was messed up, so I moved the game and Mod Organizer to a separate drive, and that didn't change anything.

I checked my save games, and they are not particularly large, about 8 MB.

I am not having this issue with any other game I am playing at the moment.

Anyone ever see this and manage to fix it?