Hello everyone,

I am new here at the official Elder Scrolls forums as you can see. Although I have been using the Steam forums for 4 years now. I have been playing Elder Scrolls games since Morrowind, though I have recently got into the modding part of their games. I've been using the CK for about 3 months now without any problems until yesterday. I go to save my mod progress and I get a warning message that reads, "Masterfile: Unable to complete operation due to failure removing previous file. Plugin 'Data\Bodyguard.esp' may be locked or read only. Temp file 'Data\Bodyguard.tes' contains saved data."

Anybody know what exactly this means? It won't save my progress to the esp file. Instead it saves it to the .tes file. Which I've never even seen before now. Is this some new feature in the CK am not aware about?

This usually happens when you're running the game at the same time you're using the CK. If the game is using the esp that you're working on, the file cannot be written to.

With CK version 1.6, Bethesda introduced a new feature that will let you save your file and update the changes that you've made, without closing the game down. Read instructions here -

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1385562-creation-kit-feature-hot-loading-plugins/

That's impossible, the game has been closed for over 24 hours now. Yes I am aware of that new feature. Although it does not work for me, it just crashes the game to desktop. There's gotta be a reason the CK thinks the game is still running even though it isn't?

I was just stating that it's the usual reason that you can't write to file. You obviously have a different problem.
Have you checked the file to make sure it's not read only ?
Can you tried to change the name of the esp manually ?

Some folk find that they have to run the CK as an administrator before the system lets them overwrite files.

Your first post gave me an idea. To check Windows Task Manager and see if Skyrim was still running for some reason. Strangely the game was still running in the background even though I closed out of it over 24 hours ago. So the game didn't close properly. That's why I was getting the Masterfile warning message listed above. Thank you for your help Tamb0. I wouldn't of ever guessed to look at the Task Manager if you didn't give me the idea.

Just an FYI for anyone who might have this issue in the future, check your Task Manager and make sure Skyrim isn't running even if you thought you closed out of it.

Glad it's sorted. It is strange that the game didn't quit correctly.
I can honestly say, it's never happened to me and I wouldn't even have thought of checking the task manager.
Something new learned