So I finally hit the TESTool Merge Objects crash bug that I had read about quite a bit and had dreaded running into. It happened after I added some mods that only added a few conflicts. So, I figured what I would do is trim some of the conflicts that I don't need to merge from my load order by editing some of the esps, effectively reducing the number of merged objects by about 150. That made sense, seeing as adding 5 conflicts made it crash, so removing 150 conflicts should give me some more breathing room. Well, it still crashed. So, I decided to look into merging one half of my list and then the second half, creating two separate esps, which is the solution I usually see posted when this comes up on the boards. The problem with that is you end up losing some desirable merges as conflicts are more like a spider web across the load order, especially with tons of mods. Another solution would be to comb through the load order and herd off mods that only conflict within their group. Well with my mod list, that wasn't as easy as it sounded and I was still getting the crash after trying it to a certain extent. So, I thought I'd try something just on a whim and started deselecting mods that have no conflicts or had only a few that weren't necessary to merge, and thus don't need to be added to the TESTool scan. Well after deselecting only about 25 such mods, I tried again and no crash! Furthermore, my TESTool merge result number is now higher than when it first crashed. :celebration:

Anyway, thought I'd post my solution as I had never seen it suggested before and I think its an easier work around than the other options.

Sorry for the double post but I've now entered the twilight zone.

After further messing around with TESTool I've found that I can now keep its merged objects feature from crashing by not including one mod (one!) from merged objects, namely the Julan companion mod esp, which was included in previous merges but now seems to be a factor in and of itself. TESPCD reports only some dialog conflicts and a few identical global settings with another mod's esm (all of which were present in many other successful merged objects scans).

Does anyone fully understand why TESTool crashes or is it pretty much a mystery?

Text buffer overflow. if/when it happens may depend on mods size, order, content, so there is no simple rule and it may seem random.
Usually bigger/changing object properties mods need more merges, so are best candidates to fill the (read/write/both?) TESTool text buffer faster.
For curiosity sake, try keeping Julan and remove another couple of big mods of similar size and see what happens.
[[EDIT]clarification

I'm not technical enough to understand the text buffer overflow, but after fiddling with a work-around, I definitely learned that it seems quite random.


Curiously, there really are no object conflicts from the Julan mod and the LGNPC mod mentioned below adds less than ten such conflicts. Another mod about the same size as the Julan mod, Piratelord's Trade Enhancements adds a TON of conflicts but seems to have minimal weight in contributing to the crash. (Well, compared to these other mods that single-handedly stop the crash when removed, anyway.)


I did as you suggested with all other mods of similar size or more (about 10 total or so) by themselves and TESTool continued to crash, except for two, LGNPC Pax Redoran and the Morrowind Patch.

EDIT: Experimented further with the LGNPC mods and it only takes deselecting one or two of these mods to stop the crash. Could it be that dialogue intensive mods such as these and the Julan mod contribute heavily to the crash, if not the heaviest contributors?

Could be. If problem is generated log messages on TESTool mod scanning overflowing the text buffer before being able to be witten on disk, it may be that dialog-heavy mods tend to generate more log text.
Having no source code, it is difficult to figure exactly :shrug: