I have more than 800 hours on Skyrim, and have been all the way through several times. I went away to try Enderal, and am now coming back. I decided to do a complete reinstall of Skyrim Legendary Edition via Steam to make sure my setup is pristine. I uninstalled AND deleted the Skyrim folders in Steam after the uninstall. I did install SKSE again using the Steam Install, but no mods.

I start the game ...

The cart ride down to Helgen starts as usual, music plays, wheel noise, everything looks good,

Gralof looks at me. And says NOTHING. We continue down the hill and into Helgen, with none of the usual pvssyr from the guy from Rorikstead whose name I cannot remember, and the carts stop in the usual place. And NOTHING further happens. Gralof continues to stare at me in silence. The cart noise continues even though we are standing still. I was forced to just quit.

I repeated several times, both from the Steam SKSE start and from the Vanilla start. The same result. I tried 6 times.

I have just reinstalled from scratch so I am stumped as to what to do next.

I guess I could try reinstalling from the CD ... ?

Das

Tried a game cache verify?

I just tried it, and got the message "1 file failed to validate and will be reacquired" And it is now just sitting there -- no indication that the file has been "reacquired"