Ported entire account to a new win11 machine, SteamVR is fine but MO2 no longer starts SkyrimVR

[Tazling]

I am migrating to a more powerful gaming PC.  My old setup was 3080, Reverb G2.  The new machine has a 4080 (and a beefier CPU and more mem).  I rolled Win11 back to 23H2 so I could hang on to my G2 a while longer.  After installing the older win11 I just xeroxed my entire home folder contents and all MO2 folders onto the new machine carefully, so that the paths remained the same... except for one wee issue that the username Windows assigned me is different.  But afaik all the MO2 and Steam stuff uses $HOME var so this should not matter.

After a bit of struggle -- not much really -- I had Steam and SteamVR running, WMR running, Reverb G2 able to play other Steam games like KayakVR.  Everything looked the same as on the old gaming crate.  Yippee!

So finally I got to the whole point of the exercise.  I bought this new toy mostly for playing SkyrimVR.  So I fired up MO2 and tried launching SkyrimVR from MO2 as per usual.  MO2 seemed fine, was showing my profile correctly.

Attempt No. 1:  things almost seemed normal, I got the WMR "whooshing b/w triangles" effect and then the SteamVR "distant mountains" waiting room and then the black space of Skyrim startup, with the 3d dragon sigil.  The floating clouds/mist appeared.  And that was it.  The Skyrim startup menu never happened.  I waited a minute or two but nothing, so forcibly exited (back to WMR home).  I saw a fleeting MO2 popup error message that said something about Higgs and an esm, but it vanished before I could screenshot it.

Attempt No. 2: Scratching my head I checked a few paths, tried running other Steam games in VR, and then just for grins tried launching again from MO2.  This time the behaviour was different.  Never got into VR at all :-(  Instead I got a message about nxm links (harmless as far as I can tell) and then a blank popup error box from MO2 and a hang.  Nothing happens.  If I close MO2 I get a warning message from Win11 and it reports "to the developer".  All subsequent attempts to launch SkyrimVR from MO2 do exactly the same thing.  And that was the close of play last night.

The blank error message is not helpful :-)  but maybe the earlier fleeting glimpse of a message about Higgs might be relevant?  I'm guessing that when I copied all my user files from the old machine to the new machine, there was some obscure part of the MO2 or Skyrim mod setup that either depends on a registry update or on my old username.  But how to find that obscure hiccup I am not sure.  Reinstalling from scratch is the last resort as I have over 100 hours into this playthrough :-)  There is also the weird fact that the first time I tried it, it almost worked... and that first attempt appears to have buggered something up so that all subequent attempts fail earlier than the first one.

If anyone recognises the symptoms here or has been through a port of their whole Steam and Skyrim and MO2 setup to another PC, a clue or two could save me a lot of wasted time groping around randomly in stuff I don't fully understand.  I throw myself on your mercy, kind strangers.  Meanwhile I'm off to try to find the MO2 log files, something I have never previously needed...

[z929669]

1 hour ago, Tazling said:

I am migrating to a more powerful gaming PC.  My old setup was 3080, Reverb G2.  The new machine has a 4080 (and a beefier CPU and more mem).  I rolled Win11 back to 23H2 so I could hang on to my G2 a while longer.  After installing the older win11 I just xeroxed my entire home folder contents and all MO2 folders onto the new machine carefully, so that the paths remained the same... except for one wee issue that the username Windows assigned me is different.  But afaik all the MO2 and Steam stuff uses $HOME var so this should not matter.

After a bit of struggle -- not much really -- I had Steam and SteamVR running, WMR running, Reverb G2 able to play other Steam games like KayakVR.  Everything looked the same as on the old gaming crate.  Yippee!

So finally I got to the whole point of the exercise.  I bought this new toy mostly for playing SkyrimVR.  So I fired up MO2 and tried launching SkyrimVR from MO2 as per usual.  MO2 seemed fine, was showing my profile correctly.

Attempt No. 1:  things almost seemed normal, I got the WMR "whooshing b/w triangles" effect and then the SteamVR "distant mountains" waiting room and then the black space of Skyrim startup, with the 3d dragon sigil.  The floating clouds/mist appeared.  And that was it.  The Skyrim startup menu never happened.  I waited a minute or two but nothing, so forcibly exited (back to WMR home).  I saw a fleeting MO2 popup error message that said something about Higgs and an esm, but it vanished before I could screenshot it.

Attempt No. 2: Scratching my head I checked a few paths, tried running other Steam games in VR, and then just for grins tried launching again from MO2.  This time the behaviour was different.  Never got into VR at all :-(  Instead I got a message about nxm links (harmless as far as I can tell) and then a blank popup error box from MO2 and a hang.  Nothing happens.  If I close MO2 I get a warning message from Win11 and it reports "to the developer".  All subsequent attempts to launch SkyrimVR from MO2 do exactly the same thing.  And that was the close of play last night.

The blank error message is not helpful :-)  but maybe the earlier fleeting glimpse of a message about Higgs might be relevant?  I'm guessing that when I copied all my user files from the old machine to the new machine, there was some obscure part of the MO2 or Skyrim mod setup that either depends on a registry update or on my old username.  But how to find that obscure hiccup I am not sure.  Reinstalling from scratch is the last resort as I have over 100 hours into this playthrough :-)  There is also the weird fact that the first time I tried it, it almost worked... and that first attempt appears to have buggered something up so that all subequent attempts fail earlier than the first one.

If anyone recognises the symptoms here or has been through a port of their whole Steam and Skyrim and MO2 setup to another PC, a clue or two could save me a lot of wasted time groping around randomly in stuff I don't fully understand.  I throw myself on your mercy, kind strangers.  Meanwhile I'm off to try to find the MO2 log files, something I have never previously needed...

I don't use VR, so I cannot help in that regard.

First, launch the game via Steam to establish the correct registry entries.

Then check the Troubleshooting section of the Nexus Description for HIGGS - Enhanced VR Interaction (I assume you are using this). Your issue can probably be resolved if you follow that advice.

[Greg]

In addition to what Z says above, I suggest trying to run vanilla SkyrimVR from File Explorer without any mods or additional DLLs to localize the problem.

[GSDFan]

I have never run into this and also do not run any VR.

I did some searching and found this link, It may help. Scroll down to the last post.