My game has been crashing after hitting continue for a few days now. I've tried everything, reinstall, uninstall, deleting all my saves :'(, uninstalling all the mods, and the game ran without mods, but having poured around 150 hours in without mods. I want to play with mods, so without them, this game does me no good. All my mods came from steam workshop, with the exception of Cloaks of Skyrim which I used NMM to download. I have deleted my preference files before, I have changed my compatibility to administrator/windows xp SP3, I've tried eliminating individual mods one at a time... Nothing. Any mods and it doesn't work.

Things that happen:
Game loads fine all the way to menu.
If I hit continue it will go to the loading screen, then crash.
If I hit new, it freezes at the main menu, the options disappear, and they keep chanting (taunting me.)
My Skyrim is updated to the latest version
I do not have SKSE or any related mods
If I start the game without making the plugins folder read only, something will delete the skyrim.esm/update.esm from the list.
Even when I make them read only the game still crashes.

I have tried almost all the conventional fixes that I can think of and had a very helpful and friendly redditor try to walk me through everything he could think of... Nothing seems to work. I am completely at a lost, I've tried googling over and over again ,but nothing seems to come to mind. This is a legal copy that I paid $60 for and I am looking at the case right now, so it's not an issue with that.

I am lost at this point and it's been almost a week I've been trying to fix this, please help.

Um, I had posted this in the hardware/software issues subforum, but somehow this had been moved to mods?

Skyrim.esm and Updates.esm do not need to be in plugins.txt, the game will always load them, so that's not the cause of your issues.

Your post was probably moved to the mods forum because you're having issues with your game when you use mods.

Have you tried without any mods?

By the way, neither of those files need to be in plugins.txt. They're always loaded either way.