About a year ago I played a heavily modded Skyrim with close to the 250 limit. It ran fine. It lauched quickly, loaded saves quickly, and had decent fps with few crashes. A week ago I opened mod organizer and attempted to load the exact same load order with the exact same settings and esp's, and everything has changed. Mod organizer took 2-3 minutes to load the esp's in the column on the right. Then I attempted to lauch SKSE through mod organizer, the black skse loader box popped up and then dissapeared quickly, and then took about 5 minutes to actually launch Skyrim and get to the start menu, if it didnt crash in the process. Then it took ages to actually load a save, and was running at 2-3 fps and freezing/crashing constantly. Same with a new game.

Long story short, after much troubleshooting, I took a working hard drive and put a clean install of windows along with skyrim and it's requirements, installed Mod Organizer and took the entire Mods folder and profiles from my main drive and copied it to the new Windows/MO/Skrim install, and the problems persist. This leads me to think it may be a hardware issue, but SKyrim is the ONLY program/game I'm having problems with. I can play other more resource intensive games just fine. I ran hardware diagnositcs, memtest, etc., even replaced the PSU since I had one lying around. No errors found and no change.

Was thinking perhaps it was the Mods folder itself, maybe somehow corrupt, so I started re-downloading and reinstalling virtually every mod with fresh copies, and now it freezes a lot and has odd flashing during launches and loads, along with being extremely slow. I then started with zero mods activated, and it launches almost immediately, then handful of mods by handful of mods I started reactivating and launching the game, and when I get to around 15-20 mods or so, the extreme launch times start. As of right now, I can almost play the game with around 180 mods loaded with decent fps and little stuttering, but it still takes around 5 minutes to launch skyrim, and a few minutes to load saves, and in game loading screens are lengthy as well.

I'm totally lost as what the problem could be. Why Skyrim and nothing else? The only thing that I can think of now, is graphics drivers. That's really the only thing that has changed since skyrim was in working form a year ago, and one of the few things present on both the new hard drive with fresh windows and skyrim, and the old one. Although, I dont see why graphics drivers would cause extreme launch times?

Could it be a hardware issue that for some reason only shows itself with Skyrim?