OMFG I thought I hated win 7 for gaming, especially for modding but at least once you got around the whole admin mess and installed files in their own directories outside of prog or progX86, modding was easier. Win 8.1 on the other hand is a gamer's nightmare. I thought to go down memory lane seeing as I hadn't played Morrowind in ages and I'd heard of a whole batch of mega mods to spruce up the graphics and game as whole and decided to give it a shot. Problem is, No matter how many times I install Tribunal and bloodmoon expansions, they never show up on my data list when I launch Morrowind(which they should) and when trying to d-load mods, the mods and mod manager act as though neither expansion is even installed!!?? WTH!!! If I was some paranoid conspiracy theorist I'd surmise that windows is systematically and with each new win os release trying to single-handedly eradicate pc gaming and modding. Luckily I'm not paranoid...am I? But man ever since I got win 8.1 I've had issues with a great many of my games(I had also upgraded my processor/ram/memory) in order to make sure I could run a new game from another company(I suppose there's no harm mentioning it since this isn't an endorsemant, simply a mention) called Dragon age:Inquisition. The absolute worst problems have been with anything using games for windows platform...yes I'm talking about you fallout 3 and the workaround THAT is a royal pita. So bottom line, wth is going on and why won't the computer recognize either expansion or their .esm files? I'm tempted to just say chuck it and just run many of these games on my 2nd computer that still runs win 7 and will continue to do so forever, no more support be ********!! Unless they can prove to me that win 10 is a LOT more gamer friendly, I've no intention of touching that thing with a ten foot wallet.

For now, does anyone know WHY this crap is even happening?

Please calm down. Let us work through this together.

First, the topic title is a little misleading since there are no esp for neither Tribunal or Bloodmoon, because both expansions are master files meaning they have the esm file extension.

Tribunal.esm

Bloodmoon.esm

Second, you can do exactly the same in Windows 8.x as you do in Windows 7 with a few changes though. So read this http://www.gamesas.com/topic/781497-vistawindows-7-problems/ about installing Morrowind in newer OS than Windows XP.

What Leonardo said! I play it on 64-bitWin 8.1.

Just make sure you install it somewhere other than under Windows default choice of Program Files for all the reasons you mentioned. And then make sure that you set the game's folder properties to allow read/write including sub-folders and files. Probably redundant, but from time to time you might want to double-check that hasn't changed, particularly when you add or update mods to your game.

I have been running a heavily modded Morrowind, including both Tribunal and Bloodmoon and MGSO, as well as many other mods, on Windows 8.0, and later 8.1 since the day 8.1 was released, with absolutely no issue. I seriously doubt your troubles are caused by Windows 8.