dasmotiu

I am going to answer my own question, at least partially. About nine months ago, way before the sequence I described in the OP, I took a backup of my MO Folder. It stayed in place on my hard drive. At some later point, but before the OP events, for some reason MO's profiles folder setting was set to this backup. I have no recollection of doing this, I can only assume MO has a way of searching for a folder and if it finds one that matches various criteria, it chooses it. The fact that this setting was in place for some time is revealed by the fact that most of my Mod settings made in the intervening period were made in the backup folder, not in my c:\Games\ModOrganizer folder. I failed to notice this. So recently when I thought I was cleaning the slate by moving the NO folders to an offline drive, I was actually doing nothing of the kind. That information survived in the backup folder, and all my problems ensued. I think I am now clean.

I have been using MO with Skyrim for three years with complete satisfaction and delight, and have over 800 hours logged. Recently after trying Enderal, I decided to go back, deleted Skyrim in Steam and reinstalled from scratch. I kept my MO profile intact. When I restarted, Skyrim worked correctly, but SkyUI would not work. Its menus did not appear, all I got was the original console UI. So I decided to be more radical. I moved my ENTIRE C:/Games folder, including Steam and MO, to a USB drive. I also moved C:/…./MyDocuments/MyGames/Skyrim, containing all the saved games, ini files etc. I then reinstalled Steam, then Skyrim, SKSE and MO from scratch. I started a new game. After the intro on the way to Riverwood I saved and exited. I re-downloaded and installed about one third of the 74 mods I had previously been using, including SkyUI, and adding two new follower mods, a total of 23. I used the “Default†profile. SkyUI and other mods worked, but I had no chance to check out all of them. I went through the Riverwood scenario, etc, got the Bleak Falls Barrow quest, set off to Whiterun, encountered the Giant/Companions, got up to the gate of Whiterun and there it hung. I restarted and was surprised to see the “this save relies on content that is no longer present†message. I saw that all my old MO profiles were back, referring to the 74 mods from the old config, in a form I have not used for about 9 months or more, and which now theoretically only existed on an offline USB drive. There was no sign of the new profile or the new follower mods anywhere. One consolation is that the C:/Games/ModOrganizer/Mods folder still contains only my 23 newly installed mods, but MO’s profiles seem to have reached back to something that was deleted. Can anyone explain this? Where else are these profiles stored? What happened to my new clean profile?

Today for the first time I noticed an odd structure in my MO left panel. One of the mods had a downward-pointing arrow to the left of it. I clicked this arrow and I found some other mods grouped under it. I do not remember doing anything explicitly to make this happen. I tried to drag an individual mod out of the group, but dragging simply moved the whole group. The mods in the group are not related to each other as far as I can tell. I uninstalled the mods in the group and then started reinstalling them. They immediately went back into the same group. What does this grouping signify? I have been happily using MO for six months without a single problem, and now I am confused. Das