I have a quest that starts up immediately upon loading the game. I have checked all my scripts and cannot find anything that would indicate that the quest should auto-initiate.

I made the quest the same way as I did in another .esp file, which worked completely fine. I followed the Creation Kit wiki closely when making these quests.

Is this a common bug? Is there a culprit I can check? Did I really do something wrong? I know this is difficult without seeing my file, but I can check any suggestions someone makes.

I could not find a similar topic. Apologies if this is a duplicate of a similar-themed thread.

Is its "Start Game Enabled" flag ticked?

Yes. That should just mean it's available to get at any point, right? I guess one way is to remove that and then set up another quest to enable it.

Nope. That means it will initialize all on its own. Untick that flag if you want to control when the quest starts.

Allegedly the story manager can help with this sort of thing. I haven't used it yet, but I have looked at some of the tutorials on Youtube, and it seems to address this "kick-off" issue and memory management.

Don't put text in a stage flagged as "start up stage."