Yesterday, I upgraded my laptop from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, and I'm really liking the new upgrade. It's fast, has new features I like, and looks good. But now that I have installed Skyrim, it won't run. Here's a little bit of backdrop:
On July 23, 2015, I had a pretty major issue with my laptop that I still don't know the cause to. It started with getting an application error for LogonUI.exe, which caused me to be unable to log into my laptop. Since it started into Safe Mode just fine, I was able to try and figure it out there. Since the Windows Event Viewer alluded to my graphics drivers, I tried reinstalling my AMD Catalyst Control Center, but after uninstalling it, I couldn't reinstall it. So, I tried AMD's removal tool, and that somehow completely screwed up my Windows installation and I had to restore it from HP's restore partition on the hard drive. I got everything all figured out just before Windows 10's release date.
Because of this issue and the fact that Windows 10 would be out very quickly, I decided not to reinstall my games (including Skyrim and Cities: Skylines) until Windows 10 was installed.
Now that Windows 10 is installed, I have begun to reinstall all of my games, starting with my two Steam games. Cities: Skylines runs just fine, but Skyrim doesn't run at all. When I installed it for the first time under Windows 10, I installed all of my mods I had backed up before I even launched the game for the first time (I know, smart, right?). When I went to launch it, I got three errors, all about missing dynamic link library files. The only one I can remember was that it said "d3dx9.dll" or something very similar (maybe d3dx9_43.dll) was missing. That's a file related to DirectX, which I thought was a little strange since I should have DirectX 12 because I'm on Windows 10. So, I went and installed what I presume to be DirectX 9, and it went all fine and dandy. Skyrim now launches, but there's a new issue. It crashes right after the Bethesda logo.
Since I have had that issue with the game crashing after the Bethesda logo, I figured it was a mod related issue, so I just went ahead and reinstalled the game, but forgot to "remove" the mods in the Nexus Mod Manager. So, I removed the mods in the Nexus Mod Manager. Still, the same crash occurred. So, I went and uninstalled the game again, but this time, I went into my Steam folder and deleted the remnants of the Skyrim installation. Then, I shut my computer off for the night.
Now, I'm installing the game again, and I will launch it clean this time. For the time being, I would appreciate it if someone could shed some light on this situation.
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?EDIT: Actually, it did turn out to have something to do with the mods. All I needed to do was just remove the last remaining bits of the Skyrim installation, reinstall it and it runs fine now. I just need to configure its AMD Catalyst Control Center profile so it performs better.