» Fri Aug 09, 2013 10:27 pm Prologue - wherein my hardware is explained
I've owned Skyrim since the day it came out on PC. Well, before then, really, since I preordered it. About a year ago, having fried a perfectly good (and inescapably overpriced) gaming laptop, I had limited spare income, a Pentium 4 computer with no PCI-E (for -Express) slots, and the urge to continue playing Skyrim. After days and nights - mostly nights, honestly - I bought a PSU that could power anything more than a lightbulb and the best PCI (non-Express) card I could find - the ZOTAC GT 430.
Running on PCI, even with the "best" card available, gives you enough bandwidth to, say, wiggle a twig through, where a PCI-Express 3.0 card could take your Grampa's walking stick. But God and gamers know that the need to play trumps all - and medium settings in Skyrim made the game a bit less sixy, but it was playable, mod-able, breakable. Everything you'd want in a Bethesda game.
And then Dragonborn came out.
Sometime after that, with a new job, a new car, and its new loan to pay off, I was saving up for that expansion, so I spent more time at work and less time spawning dremora armies in Windhelm. After a long day at work, weeks later, and the thought - I haven't played Skyrim in a while, huh? Well, I loaded it up, waited for the game to start
- dragon symbol appears, as expected -
waited for the options to show up (continue, new game, you know them well) -
waited for the options to show up...
Waited for the options - okay, you get the point.
THE PROBLEM
Out of nowhere, having added no mods, changed no settings, no driver updates, and - to my knowledge - no updates to Skyrim... the game would no longer start. Not because of crashes, nor blue screens, but because it had forgotten how to let the smoke rise from the bottom of the screen and load the options in the title menu.
Of course, I thought, I must have a mod that's breaking the game - and so I checked through all of them, leaving the game in windowed mode to more easily tab out and kill the task when, invariably, no options would show. None of the mods were causing the problem.
I then uninstalled Skyrim, deleted the saves and ini folders, deleted the Skyrim folder entirely, and reinstalled from scratch. And it RAN! Glory, hallelujah, et cetera! So I closed it and changed some options - namely, I put it in fullscreen mode - and ran the game again. And I waited for the title screen to load the options.
...
You see the problem now.
Every clean install, it runs once. Then it will never run again until removed / reinstalled. It doesn't even need to be a clean reinstall. I updated drivers, I lowered settings to the minimum, I tried a half-dozen esoteric .dll hacks and script-extended performance mods, but none of them could fix the simple, incredible problem of the title screen forgetting how to load after the first run.
And there are no "nvm i fixened it" posts on gaming forums for this exotic little bug. Nor have I seen any other sufferers post their hardware specs. Those who have fixed it have explained their methods: the clean install, changing their computer's sound quality settings, or deleting the 600 mods they had loaded. I have stood apart from my dear, abandoned Skyrim for months now, able to play ever other Elder Scrolls game, every Fallout, every Mass Effect. But TES V has gone insane. I could use any fresh ideas about now.
