Slow fade to black and hang when loading interiors

[Farlo]

As the title says, very frequently when loading an interior I get the normal loading screen followed by a 2-3 second fade to pitch black and then it hangs there with the background music taking up 25% CPU usage until I kill the process.  Thankfully the auto-save kicks in before the crash so I can resume right where I left off, but it's still pretty annoying.  

 

I'm running STEP, a few other graphics mods, Skyrim Monster Mod, EFF, Apocalypse Spell Package, Automatic Variants, Economics of Skyrim and ACE Skills Overhaul, along with the Z-fighting INI tweaks.  I've run the setup through BOSS and made a Bashed Patch (oddly enough only Perfect Legionnaire was flagged to be merged).  I'll do some more extensive testing tomorrow but disabling all but STEP + the texture mods didn't seem to fix it, any ideas as to what might cause this or better testing methods than going mod-by-mod?

[torminater]

Well, I'ld say it's script related. Papyrus has a logging feature you can activate in your skyrim.ini. Just in case activate tracing too (just set em to 1 instead of 0). you'll get a Logs/Scripts folder in your MyGames/Skyrim directory and there a maximum of 4 logs (standard value, might be changeable) is saved. just look at the end of the script before the "VM is freezing", "VM is frozen", "Log closed" section. It will say what kind of script it tried to run last. Then google it and find out whether others have had problems with it, or to find out to which mod it belongs (maybe even vanilla) and contact the mod author with your problem. Also have a look at this:

In your Skyrim.ini include under [General]:

iLargeIntRefCount=999999

 

This will help if you have mods that place loads of stuff into interiors. can't do any damage.

[blacksol]

Also turn off autosaves - that solved those hang ups for me and removed the drop to 2-3 fps on transition to interiors (still get them occasionally on transition to exteriors)

[Farlo]

Also turn off autosaves - that solved those hang ups for me and removed the drop to 2-3 fps on transition to interiors (still get them occasionally on transition to exteriors)

But if the hangs continue without the auto-save then I'll be screwed! :(

Well, I'ld say it's script related. Papyrus has a logging feature you can activate in your skyrim.ini. Just in case activate tracing too (just set em to 1 instead of 0). you'll get a Logs/Scripts folder in your MyGames/Skyrim directory and there a maximum of 4 logs (standard value, might be changeable) is saved. just look at the end of the script before the "VM is freezing", "VM is frozen", "Log closed" section. It will say what kind of script it tried to run last. Then google it and find out whether others have had problems with it, or to find out to which mod it belongs (maybe even vanilla) and contact the mod author with your problem. Also have a look at this:

In your Skyrim.ini include under [General]:

iLargeIntRefCount=999999

 

This will help if you have mods that place loads of stuff into interiors. can't do any damage.

I've had the iLargeIntRefCount fix for some time, and wondered if that was a possible candidate but turning it off doesn't seem to have made a difference and you say it's benign, so that's out.  Thanks for the logging tip, I'll go investigate that now and report back.

[blacksol]

f5 is your friend :) or at least a normally reliable safety net

[Farlo]

No, F11 is my friend. :D