Thanks for the advice. I disabled the anti-virus, even though I cannot shut down the process entirely (probably it still has a service or something running in the background--good old NOD32 ) and I still ran into crashes. Although until now the crashes were random, now I have gotten to a point where 90% of the time I want to load a certain save, the game crashes to desktop and in the MO log I keep seeing this message: INFO (22:00:06.0059): Windows Exception (c0000005). Origin: "D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim\TESV.exe" (bfecc1). Last hooked call: struct HINSTANCE__ *__stdcall LoadLibraryExW_rep(const wchar_t *,void *,unsigned long).