Thanks Tom! Worked like a charm

I hope your load order was sorted by BOSS before you did that, haha... Oh, well, only takes a minute to do it again.

Hey, it was sorted by BOSS before I did that. I tried doing it again as well to make sure. It made all the DLC's green in Wrye Bash so I thought it worked.

Oblivion still won't start with it enabled, disabled and it runs just fine. Any ideas?!

If it was the an error on my part while merging the Unofficial patches with their parent DLC's then disabling the SM plugin would not fix it. Or would it?

I followed the guide you linked on the first page to the letter (and it's not too in depth for the UOMP and the DLC's.) I did the Merge to Master function correctly, although when doing it I had to change the filter to *All Files* because it defaults to looking for an actual .esm instead of the DLC****.esp.

That's all I could think of as to why the SM plug-in won't let Oblivion start (is that I somehow merged the UOMP's with the DLC's incorrectly, but I don't see how,) but then again it could be completely unrelated.

I just tried this on my build.

I have the DLC UOPs merged into the DLCs.
Installed SM Plugin merged, was pink.

BOSSed my list

Started TES4Edit, unchecked all, checked SM plugin
When loading was done, right-click on SM plugin and chose sort masters
Saved
BOSSed again, SM Plugin went green

Started OB
New
Skip tutorial
Everything worked, no DLC popups
Exit sewers OK

EDIT: I did not build the bashed patch and did not have it active

EDIT: Bult patch and tested again. Worked.

It the SM plugins are not finding certain references, that could cause a crash...

Hmm.... thanks for confirming and oh, nice name if that is actually your name :foodndrink: .

When you merged your Thieves Den DLC, did you have two Unofficial patches? I had two for some strange reason one with an SSSB at the end. Maybe that is the problem since I merged two patches into the .esp?

I also didn't un-check 254 other .esp's (that's a lot of clicking lol.) I don't think you have to? At the end it gave me the option to save just the SM .esp .

You can try with a copy of the original DLCs. That would tell you abou that.

Or get the original SM plugin and try again.

Tried with a fresh SM Plugin thinking that like you said I screwed up the references by pointing to the files again. Still no go, I didn't disable every plug-in except for SM in TES4EDIT before doing it but that isn't necessary is it?

The first part is my name, the ID is....well I started with that 25 years ago, you know, the ID.

As for the DLC merging:
Cleaned DLCs first with TES4edit
Merged the patches

The Thieves Den, yes, two UOPs.
First I merged the UOP (not the SSSB)
saved
Merged the seconf UOP (the one with SSSB)
saved

So that one I did twice.

As for deactivating all the mods, use OBMM, right click the list, deactibate all. Same for activating all. helps a bunch, just need to uncheck the merged esps.

Don't know but I did it anyway. Lets the plugin load the needed masters instead of figuring out which ones it should use.

Ah yes, I always forget about the easy ways to deactivate .esp's lol.

Anyhow, I did everything the same as you did except I did not clean the .esp's before merging. Maybe that is where the problem lies.

Worth a shot, they go pretty quick. But I don't see why it would. Try deactivating everything but the DLCs and SM plugin. Don't activate the bashed patch. Maybe something is stuck in there. I have read in some posts that sometimes copying the blank bashed patch esp fixes some things if they get screwy.

If the SM plugin is green, that means all of the masters are accounted for, so this does not matter. Although I think this method is quicker, if you pick all of the right dependencies yourself, that works too (and he must have.)

I did all the cleaning that way, uncheck all, then check the esp to be cleaned. But for more complicated ones I can see where doing it manually might be required, but you would know better than I.

There are many cases in which you want to select more than whatever dependencies are listed in a plugin's master record...

Maybe one of these days..right now I just stick to the simple things. By the time I'm ready I hope people would have cleaned and reposted their mods, or someone might take it up as their mission to do it for them

I was not referring to mod cleaning, in particular. This is a thread on merging anyway, and, often, the mods you want to merge are not dependent on one another. Even patches for other mods may not have the plugins they patch in their master record.

True, this is thread about merging. Easy to get sidetraced. Yes, I ran into a few that had no master loaded. I just left those alone.

So what's the consensus here?

Re-install all the DLC's and go from there?

Worth a try I suppose... something must have gone screwy during the merging process. It must have. The SM plug-in (separate plug-ins that is) were working just fine before. I've added some city/house mods since then but that is it and no way that could be interfering with it.

I say deactivate all, activate the DLCs and SM plugin merged only (no bash patch) start a new game. Take you 5 minutes.

Well this is interesting, and seems you were on the right track here.

Before I read this I went ahead and un-installed all the DLC's. Didn't work after fresh re-install without the merging or the UOMP's installed.

Worked after I disabled all except for Oblivion.esm, the DLC's, and the SM-plugin.

Conflicting mods with the SM plug-in... nothing in my load order remotely like it. I could see this being a painstaking process with 255 mods lol.

I would say the problemis in the bashed patch. Copy the blank patch from Mopy\extras and rebuild.

Better Cities - House price patch.esp

Why this is conflicting I have no idea, any way to find out?

How did you determine it is conflicting?

I had an older load order without the recent mods I added saved in Wrye Bash. I enabled it, enabled about 10 mods at a time with SM Plugin and the DLC's loaded. As soon as Better Cities - house price patch.esp was checked in Wrye Bash the game did not start. Disabled it and it started again.

Just tried cleaning both plug-ins (SM and house price patch) according to this: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Tes4View#Choosing_Mods_to_Compare .

Still not working together...

EDIT: Hell, all the house price patch does it re-price the Riverside Shack to 10k lol. May as well disable it, but still interesting as to how they conflict. Looked at the patch under TES4View and all it shows it two Dialog topic's. "I'm interested" and "I'll take it" lol, don't see how it is conflicting.