Hey, I'm trying to fix some issues in one of my mods but I'm having a seriously hard time with this (generally I find solutions to bugs quickly, so I don't ask here unless it's really necessary and hard )

The issue is in my Deadly Combat mod. First a little bit of history. In version 3.84, some people were reporting randomly occuring CTDs (sometimes after 30 minutes of playing, sometimes an hour or longer) which didn't occur with my mod deactivated. They were completely unreproduceable (loading a saved game afterwards and doing the exact same things in same place didn't result in a CTD) and not related to the game running out of memory either.

Papyrus logs were showing a decent amount of errors, and even though those errors SEEMED harmless I tried to minimise them as much as possible. Back then I also made this thread about these errors: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1400800-strange-none-values-for-variables/

In the meantime, I've uploaded new version 3.85 and 3.86 of my mod and the ONLY changes in these versions were adjustments to scripts on magic effects which I apply to most NPCs around skyrim, and additional conditions for adding those magic effects (for example conditions to prevent adding of spells to disabled actors) and this reduced the amount of errors showing up and users did indeed report CTDs were gone. So apparantly these errors which should have been perfectly harmless can show up many times (mostly unavoidable for modders too), and usually are harmless but apparantly they can randomly CTD when the game feels like it.

But then new issues started popping up. Remember what I said, I've ONLY made small adjustments to remove a spell with scripted magic effects from actors and prevent adding of spells/magic effects to reduce the amount of errors showing up in papyrus logs and increase stability, and suddenly, new issues started popping up which I've never heard of before, and they are the following:

- Any scripts in the game seem to be prone to getting locked up suddenly, especially occuring in the game's intro in Helgen (I've already had so many issues in Helgen by the way, I really do wonder why that place is so incredibly instable) but possibly also elsewhere. In Helgen this means for example that the player/NPC prisoners won't get out of their cart, or after the player's ''execution'' all NPCs stand around doing nothing, or when you have to choose whether to follow Ralof or Hadvar (the stormcloak and imperial NPCs respectively) into the building they just stand there looking at each other, and the game won't proceed any further. None of these things happen all the time, and sometimes it is also possible to play through the entire intro without issues, but these are some of the most common examples I've heard in reports and seen myself when trying to reproduce.

- Dialogue suddenly breaks. I have not managed to reproduce this issue yet, but from what I've read in user reports it especially happens with followers (you won't be able to talk to them anymore) but it has also happened with for example shopkeepers (picking the dialogue option to buy/sell results in nothing happening). When such an issue pops up, the only fix is to reload a game.
This issue is somewhat similar to the issue in the latest patch with newly mod-added dialogue where new dialogue doesn't work until the player has at least once saved and reloaded the game with the mod active, in that it can be fixed by saving and reloading, but it's also very much different in that it occurs to vanilla dialogue and that it randomly happens in the middle of a game.

Also, I do not know this for sure but it is POSSIBLE that the first issue is related to the second issue. I think some of those points I've mentioned where the entire game's scripting system seems to lock up, are papyrus fragments which are supposed to run after certain lines of dialogue, so it may be possible that the second issue stops such quest dialogue from working too and therefore stops the scripts from running as well, but again, I'm not 100% sure on this.

I have already checked many times and there are no dirty edits in my plugin, so that's not where the problem is.

I've been trying more things and can in no way manage to reproduce the second issue mentioned in OP, so for now I try to focus on the first issue.. but that is still being as elusive to fix as it was when I posted the OP

Your Helgen issues sound a whole lot like navmesh issues. When helping Balok in this thread http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?showtopic=1400158, those were exactly the type of problems I saw from his edited navmesh (and was able to fix by reverting the navmesh back to vanilla.)

As far as the dialog goes, this may or may not be related: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?showtopic=1399783. This problem does seem random as some people have problems, others have no problems. Did your dialog problems start with 1.7?

I'm sorry, I know these aren't specific answers. Not sure if there are specific answers for you... so maybe those links will help.

Nah the first issue wasn't navmesh, my entire mod is script-based and I never even opened a render window while working on that mod, also checked and had no dirty edits in saved game anyway.

I'm not sure yet, but it may actually be the case that the dialogue issues are related to the users who reported them didn't have patch 1.7 yet.

I've also just uploaded a new version, waiting for feedback on whether it solved the first issue but from my testing seemed like it did.. and I only removed some code lines which dispel my mod's scripted spells under certain circumstances to avoid errors popping up in papyrus logs related to None-pointers.. I know it seems totally unrelated but still, like I explained in the OP already, it's really strange and probably just skyrim being buggy and weird.

Two thoughts:

1) I know that Papyrus can have what are basically "stack overflow" errors. I saw this in early versions of my follower mod--I was doing some calculations in the follower's an OnHit event, and when a dragon would breathe fire on her for several seconds straight, the hits would happen faster than the calculations could match, a backlog of OnHit events would pile up, and eventually scripts would just stop working. The errors in the Papyrus log would make clear that this is what's happening, if it is. I could see this happening after Alduin attacks Helgen, but can't think why it would happen before.

2) Right at the very start of the game, it may take a second or two before aliases are filled. I found that if I tried to do anything with aliases right at the start, I'd get errors in the log when starting a new game because the alias was a None value. I had to add a Wait statement of a few seconds in my OnInit event before my mod could go through the start game sequence without errors errors relating to the alias not being filled.

I don't know if either of those tells you anything you don't already know, but (shrug) they're all I can think of.

@DreamKing

All of those are too obvious, I've thought of them too already and triple-checked if that was the case Either way, maybe I've found the solution, see post above u