I've run into a glitch that is driving me crazy here, and I've tried all I can to fix it but thus far nothing has worked. I finished off the main quest for the Thieves Guild storyline a while back and then went off to do other things. Tonight I felt like going back to the Thieves Guild and doing some of the "odd jobs" that Vex and Delvin Mallory offer. I did several of those and had no problem with them. But now when I go back to Delvin, he tells me that people are starting to talk about the guild again and that he has a special assignment for me.

Okay, cool. Sounds good. But here's where the bug/glitch/whatever comes in: Delvin will go through a couple lines of dialogue, tell me to head to Windhelm, and then... nothing. The dialogue closes itself, no quest is added to my journal, and Delvin will now just repeat the same line over and over. I checked a couple of the wikis and saw that I'm supposed to speak to Torsten in Windhelm. So I went there and tried talking to him, but since there's no quest active I can't bring the topic up with him.

I've tried using setstage to start the quest, to move to later portions of the quest, and to even just "complete" the quest altogether. None of that works because the quest never actually triggers. I've also disabled every mod I have installed. I searched around Google about this as well and I seem to be the only one who has ever run into this problem. No mention of this bug on the wikis either. I can't get new quests from Vex either because now she just tells me to finish up the special task that Delvin gave me.

Has anyone else ever experienced this glitch? Any ideas on how to fix or bypass this?

I've uploaded a video on YouTube to illustrate the problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdUCEoDwBUI

If Torsten isn't giving you the right dialogue options either, perhaps try talking directly to Niranye? I didn't have any problem with this quest when I did the TG line, but I've had other quests go buggy on me (Blood on the Ice, for example) where one person wouldn't give their dialogue but the next person would, and that would still advance the quest. I suppose if all else fails, you can go to Uttering Hills and wipe them all out, hopefully that will advance the quest if nothing else does.

Alright, I'll give that a shot. Can't hurt at this point, may as well. Thanks for the tip.

I think I see what part of the problem is. I couldn't find Niranye anywhere, so I used the "moveto player" command to bring her to me. It worked, but she's dead. When I resurrected her, she asked if I was back to "inflict more pain" on her. No dialogue options for "Summerset Shadows" came up with her. I'm guessing she must've been killed during the civil war quest, as I don't remember seeing her prior to this. I'll try resurrecting her first and then talking to Delvin to start the quest.

IT WORKED! Before talking to Delvin, I went to Windhelm, used "prid 0001b11c", then "moveto player" and Niranye's corpse appeared by me. I then resurrected her. Just to be extra safe, I then set her relationship rank to 4. At this point, I went and spoke to Delvin. He went through the same dialogue as before except that this time the quest actually started! So that's what the problem was. If Niranye is dead, it will severely break the "Summerset Shadows" quest, which prevents any further progress with the Thieves Guild.

This is all happening to me now. I did the Niranye command. She is alive and well but not giving me any quest dialogue. As you said, Torsten is also not giving me the quest dialogue.