After about 1 year of not playing, I reinstalled a non-modded Skyrim but the program does not run beyond the launcher part. If I click on TESV.exe, I get a "the application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b)" error. I don't recall what I've changed on my pc since I last played. I'm currently on win 8.1 64 bit, directx 11 (not sure if there's a problem with the skyrim directory showing a folder for directx 10); new NVIDIA gtx 970.

Google suggests either a 64 bit or direct x issue. Any help would be appreciated.

thanks in advance!

When you Uninstalled the game before, did you then delete the Skyrim game folder and the Skyrim folder in My Documents/My Games/Skyrim? Note your saves are in this folder so back them up if you want to keep them.

If you had mods before, there maybe files that were left over from those mods that are causing the issues.

Thanks. I found the folder with a few old saves again after I'm sure I deleted it (? reloaded from cloud storage maybe), so I deleted it again, but I'm still getting the same error.

I never got this error even with my mods in the past and am pretty sure all mods are gone everywhere now. I don't even have the nexus mod manager installed anymore.

Verify cache always says 1 file needs to be reacquired, no matter what I do. Not sure if that matters-- I think people have said it's normal.

I can't seem to paste my dxdiag info (or do any pasting at all) here. If there's something that would help out of that file, please let me know.

IT will almost always need to verify one file, it's a small one so don't worry about that. I think it is some kind of temp file.

If this is a new PC, then make sure your drivers are up to date, and more importantly, that you have installed your Motherboard drivers. If this a PC that you have had for a while and runs other games* then:

Possibly, make sure the Steam Cloud is disabled for the game, it might be trying to resolve you old saves with your new install (long shot)

If your installing this from disk, I would run the uninstaller, then manually delete the game folder in Program Files/Bethesda.... then install again.

*Note if this is one of those machines that has on board (CPU) graphics and a graphics card, then make sure the PC is forcing the game to run on the graphics card, not the CPU. Otherwise the system will base the game operation on the 2D Splash screens which means the CPU and it will puke when trying to run it when it gets to the 3D part of the game.