C&PD - Cleaning DLCs

[Omario]

Firstly, a very big thank you to Kelmych and all who contributed to the fantastic C&PD guide. It answered so many questions I had built up over the years of modding this game, as well as lots of extra guidance on mod compatibilities etc.

 

I followed C&PD mod guide almost to the letter; save for omitting the 19th/20th Century Weapons mod and associated.

 

One step I did omit however was the cleaning of the DLCs.

 

I have cleaned the DLCs on several occassions over the last two years with both Steam and GOG versions of the game, and without fail, I get instabilities, freezing and and markedly worse frequency of crashes with modded FO3 than I do without cleaning. This is consistent both before and after the Windows 10 updates, and with all else like-for-like (anti-crash, stutter remover, similar mods, etc)

 

I have seen a few posts on the MMM and Paradox Mergers mods comments pages on Nexus from users noting the same thing.

 

The question - how essential is the cleaning of the DLCs for FO3? Was cleaning the DLCs for FO3 common practice back in say 2010, when defining mods like MMM and FWE were released/being updated?

 

Is there any reason why the older FO3 mods would be made less stable by cleaning the DLCs?

[Kelmych]

When FO3 was released the ability to properly clean DLCs wasn't available. I have never had a problem when I cleaned then. There could potentially be problems when they are not cleaned depending on which mods are used. but I haven't seen anything definitive about cleaning or not cleaning other than issues with deleted navmesh records.

[Mator]

Some relevant discussions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/5xh5b6/guide_manual_cleaning_master_esms_for_skyrim_and/
https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/5xre7n/is_cleaning_master_files_useless_should_we_remove/