All of a sudden, my game developed a consistent CTD near Whiterun.

It happens under very specific conditions:

- I either exit Whiterun by the way of the gate - the game crashes a few seconds after the gate "cracks open" and the screen goes dark
- Or I approach Whiterun from the outside. I run up the path with the guards and guard towers, and the game crashes out when I approach the bend that leads to the Whiterun drawbridge.

It's not a lockup, it's a very clean CTD. No hints in the logs of course apart from papyrus spam.

Through absolutely torturous series of attempts, I narrowed the crash down to something near drawbridge itself (load game, approach the crashy area from a different angle, crash out, pull out a handful of hair, headdesk, repeat).

The funny thing is that there is NOTHING SPECIAL THERE. It's a teensy stretch of the road between slightly before the drawbridge and Whiterun gate. There are guards there - I tried getting rid of all mods that affect the said guards (I run Immersive Weapons and Immersive Armors), and I still crash. I tried getting rid of mods recently installed - namely a lighting mod and a climate mod. Nothing. Still crash.

One might be tempted to just say "well, you're buggered right and proper", but Skyrim acts quite normal everywhere else. That is to say it is quite stable for me. Except for that tiny stretch at the gate of Whiterun.

It's driving me absolutely bananas at this point. What could it possibly be? How do I even begin to troubleshoot it? "Disable all mods" sadly isn't an option, my game probably won't even load without some of them.

The funniest thing perhaps is that I've got no problem going in or out of Whiterun by the way of fast travel. I can teleport to INSIDE the city or FT to the stables and truck on just fine. But that stretch of the road, and that gate... are seemingly cursed.