Bethesda games... make me so depressed at times.

Been playing around with ugrids settings, and followed the procedure to bring a game with a ugrids value of 9 back down to the default 5, just to see the difference. Shortly afterwards, I decided I preferred 9, so restored the ini files I had been using before that I had backed up, and deleted the new ones the game had made for a ugrids value of 5. So I would have thought NOTHING has changed, since these are the same ini files as before. Not so.

Loading a game with a ugrids value of 9 crashes to desktop. Starting a new game shows the game with a ugrids value of 5, no tree shadows, default grass draw distance - essentially it shows the game is reading from default ini files, but my ini files aren't default. They have dozens of tweaks including ugrids set to 9 and tree shadows turned on. They worked fine before I tried switching back down to a ugrids value of 5, and now the game isn't reading them at all.

So I backed up the ini files again, deleted them from the folder (users / my documents / my games / skyrim), validated game files through Steam, restarted the launcher so that it would generate new ini files, copy/pasted the lines from my backed-up ini files into the new ones (rather than overwriting) and THAT worked. For one game session. Closing the game and starting it up again leads to red menus and default ini settings again, despite the fact the ini files are not default.

Anyone know how this is happening? It makes no sense at all to me. The game is ignoring my ini files and imagining its own pair to read from...

Look for extra Skyrim.ini file in the Skyrim\Data folder (where the game is installed). If there is one there, delete it. I'm not sure why the game creates this extra file but it did when I was changing uGrids and I got the red loading pictures etc.

Woah. Yeah. Done some more digging while waiting for a reply and found two people with similar issues who managed to finally resolve it.

One of them found an extra ini from Realistic Water Textures, that had the Skyrim.ini settings added to it.

The second guy had the same thing with a Killable Children .ini

I've just looked through all of my mods and found the exact same thing with the Triss Armor mod. For some reason, the game just merges its Skyrim.ini file into a mod's ini files at the same time as generating new ones, but then chooses to read from the mod ini file OVER the new default ini files. That's a shocking bug.

Thanks for the help JMC002. Nailed it in the first reply