Weird MO and Dawnguard animation issue

[kevtg26]

Got a weird issue where I think MO is a factor. How much of a factor I can't say because I'm not sure exactly how MO is supposed to work. I'm hoping someone here can help me with this. I have a STEP install that was working before all this happened and was about to try and reinstall to fix this but I want to make sure that will work before I go through all that trouble. There's a little bit of a story here so bear with me. Here's the deal.

 

A week or so ago the animations for any creature connected to Dawnguard got borked. Bristlebacks, Rieklings, Durzogs from Skyrim Immersive Creatures (they use the Boar race added by Dawnguard) all lost their movement, combat and death animations. The only animation they could display was their standing idle. THey could still move and chase me around, but they looked like they were skating around and couldn't attack. I had been screwing around with my installed mods and saw that this could happen if you change mods that hit NPCs. However, none of the known fixes (cell resets, Reanimator, disable / enable) worked. At this point, I reckoned I had screwed up my save so I decided to start a new game. Except the new game still had the same issues. Dawnguard critters had no animation other than idle.

 

Now I was beginning to wonder how badly I had borked my game. As a test, I started a new game from the vanilla launcher in Steam. No mods and no 3rd party software involved. I spawned a bristleback right there in Helgen and, lo and behold, all of his animations were fine. He could move, attack and fall over dead just as he was supposed to. Now I just figured I had mod issue.

 

What does all of this have to do with MO? This is where things get funny. I have a profile in MO where the ONLY things that are activated are Skrim.esm and the DLC esms. Again, almost as vanilla as you can get. I thought I'd start a new game under that one and test it it before I started screwing with the 150'ish mods I I've got loaded. When I spawned a bristleback in Helgen under that profile... no animations. All the poor guy could do was his idle. Again, the only things active where the Skyrim and DLC esms. Looking at the save in MO and looking at the save in Wrye Bash fired from within MO confirmed that they were the only mods active.

 

This gets us to the part I don't understand. Since the animations worked when I loaded the game from steam I decided that I would try to load the save I created from my vanilla MO profile in the game launched from the vanilla launcher. Take MO out of the equation. When I did that, I got a crap ton of "missing esp" warnings, none of which I had activated on that save. According to MO, all that is active on that save are 4 esms - the same 4 esms that are active if I launch the game from steam. But if I launch the game from steam, Skyrim suddenly seems to think that all the mods from my Mac Daddy profile are associated with that save. Same thing happens with Wrye Bash. If I launch Bash from within MO, it says that only 4 esms are associated with that save. If I launch bash from outside MO, it says there are about 200 esms and esps attached to the exact same save.

 

Is that something that is supposed to happen? What exactly does MO do when you shift profiles? Should a save report the same active mods whether or not I'm getting to it from MO? I think whatever is causing inactive mods to be associated with my save is also what is causing my animation issues. However, I can't tell without understanding how MO works it magic. Can anyone help with this?

Edited October 6, 2015 by kevtg26