During my trip into the Soul Cairn, I got hit by the 'Soul Drain' effect comming from those big 'Crystaline Constructs' - y'know, the big hovering purple crystals. Snakey purplish energy beam connecting it to me.

Problem is, after leaving its range, the visual effect remained. The actual health-draining effect is gone, sure, but the snakey purplish energy beam remained. I figured I could clear it just by saving and loading. But that just disconnected the other end of the snakey purplish energy beam, so now it goes straight up from me, following me like a snakey purplish energy tail everywhere I go. I've tried leaving the Soul Cairn, I've tried fast-traveling, I've even tried talking to the face-changer in the Ragged Flagon, hoping that a complete character-model reload might solve matters. No dice. It's STILL attached to me.

Whenever I'm standing still, it surrounds me completely. My entire field of view is discolored and consumed by purple flame. It is IMMENSELY annoying. Any ideas on how to shake it off?

...I stopped playing vanilla Skyrim because a bug killed off Shadowmere, and only started playing again because Dawnguard offered me Arvak as a replacement. At this rate, my return seems liable to be short-lived.

I got too close to the giant crystal on my quest & return trips to the Cairn but no lingering effects. I am curious about your choice of saving before reloading. I assume saving locks something in, so I would not do that if some odd glitch suddenly appeared. After Dawnguard I suddenly had vampire attributes during random battles even though my character has never been a vampire. I immediately quit & reloaded. Wouldn't saving have made my character a permanent vampire?

I suggest you return to a pre-purple haze save.

Since it was a purely graphical glitch, I figured 'refreshing' the game (by restarting it) would be enough to clear it. I hadn't imagined that there'd be a 'you currently have a beam of purplish energy attached to your body' integer in the savefile.

Well, regardless, I finally found a way to get rid of it... by approaching another crystal. Apparently, its beam of purplish energy overrode the 'stuck' one, and disappeared as normal once I left its range.

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure the bug was caused by a Soul Husk running out just as I was leaving the range of a crystal... well, whatever.

Same thing happened to me...I kept running back and forth into the drain effect and checking until it went away.

If you force the effect on yourself again (by returning to the Soul Cairn), you should be able to make the effect go away.