I have a lot of mods ready for a game, but when I go to merge objects, TESTools crashes, and it's crashed 4 times in a row on the Mournhold Expanded COM,esp. I uderstand it's prone to crashing when trying to merge too many mods together, but I was wondering if I need ALL the mods to be activated for this. What I mean is this: If there are some mods that maybe don't have anything to merge (such as game tweaks or custom items that are only found in 1 mod such as cutsom armors, weapons, etc.), would there be a possibility if I deactivate these, TESTools wouldn't crash on me? And perhaps maybe that's what I should be doing anyway? I always just merge the entire batch and let TESTools make the decision for me, but i'd hate to start a game without merging.

You're correct. Mods that don't alter any vanilla objects wouldn't need merging.

Ok. Well then maybe if I decativate them for the merge, hopefully TESTools won't crash.