Did you have all the papyrus complaining after you cleaned your saves? I never really knew any of this stuff until just before I posted this thread. I played Skyrim loads from release day, right up until sometime late last summer. I had the same character the whole time (and it's still the only character I have). And I can't tell you how many mods I have recklessly installed/uninstalled in that time!! Whenever I had CTD's (which really wasn't that often), I usually figured out it was a mod conflict just by mildly educated guess work. I would reorganize my load order and which files overwrite which etc, then things would be sweet. So when I read how all this stuff is permanently tied to saves, even after saving again with mods uninstalled. Well I was really surprised! Whatever happens now I think I wont be messing with ugrids. I'm also going to try and stick pretty strictly to step. Other than a few gameplay enhancing mods that is. Doing a completely fresh install of Skyrim now which hopefully means I wont have to do that esm cleaning stuff. I don't really understand what the hell that is to be honest, but I want to actually play this game sometime soon so am trying to avoid having it turn this process into doing a phd lol.... Hopefully someone will know one way or the other and can tell me what I need to do to get my original save file clean. But in the meantime I will start running through this step guide and at least try my old save game with it. Hopefully using that old savegame wont somehow mess with the game installation.... I have no idea! Thanks for the replies so far :) Edit: Btw, what RAM cap? I thought they fixed that with an offical patch a while back??