Massive falloutprefs.ini duplication in Mod Organizer

[grimZan]

Searched the whole world wide web without seeing this problem (close to it).

I use Mod Organizer for my Fallout 3 modding, and STEP has been my grail, mostly. I've modded for awhile now, so knowing what is hazardous and not, I follow STEP for MO since it's a new tool. After getting a fairly modded FO3 and running stable for hours of play, I head into the sewer entrance near Super Duper Mart, and go into county mainline sewers. Save inside, then try to load and it starts crashing. Others have had issues with this, but I don't think this is my problem.

 

I have quite a few exe's running through MO to get everything working and stable, FO3, then FOSE, with FOMM for the UI mods, then Fallout 3 Fullscreen mod, which btw is a lifesaver practically eliminating CTDs. Trying to start again the FO3Fullscreen says, "error: #maxmem full, shutting thread" and after lots of research I find my falloutprefs.ini for the MO profile has grown. A lot. Where it was 3 kb it's now 80 mb. Pull it up in Notepad ++ and what happened is the entire file has copied itself into itself, probably thousands of times, so much that I thought after hitting CTRL + END it locked up, just took awhile to get to line 3 million plus. After deleting the excess the game was perfectly playable, but it starts copying and growing like before. Thought I could make it read only, but MO won't let you run it with the RO flag. Thought it might have to do with the multiple exe's, but I've not found this problem, yet. Any ideas would be appreciated. Running 85 plugins, so let me know if you want the list, but mostly the major, popular mods, not much else.

[GrantSP]

Further to what @GSDFan said, try running it again then quit and examine your ini. If it is duplicated then you know it is happening each time the game initialises. Then I would try running the game without your fake fullscreen mod, whichever one that is, I know of at least three. If the ini is fine then you can safely say that's your culprit. That's what I'm placing my money on.

 

Then you will either have to try another one, determine the correct settings for the one you have or not use it.

If you are really desperate you could keep a copy of the correct ini and write a batch file to copy over the old with the new, fresh one before each game. That's only if you are really desperate though.

[GSDFan]

I can"t say anything specific for this problem, but make sure that no other programs loaded through MO are holding falloutprefs.ini, or any other file for that matter, open when running the game. If they are the file will grow as the file will not be released by that program when another tries to access it.

[grimZan]

Hey guys, thanks for replying, would've seen these and responded sooner, but even though I have my settings to email me when I get a response, it didn't. :)

 

Anyways, Grant you were dead on. The Fullscreen mod I use (which is the Fake Fullscreen Mode Windowed - Alt Tab Fix by BUDA20) was increasing the size of the ini everytime I launched the game, exponentially, which is why it was so large after just a few times of use. Switched to using the other program he made called Game Companion, although I have to add the executable in to MO, launch it, unlock MO so I can open a second exe, then launch FOSE. Don't know if this is recommended, but it works for now. STEP doesn't seem to use any of these tools, just seems like a setting in ENBoost for borderless windowed mode might be their replacement.

[GrantSP]

Yep, that's what is the preferred method.

Unless there is a specific reason why you really need to run those type of tools, I would try and not use them. I am in the lucky small percentage of people that has never had any issues with alt-tabbing out of any of my games, so that means my view is biased.

[grimZan]

Well my game runs great and it's stated that the performance drop is small, so I will have to switch and see if it eliminates all these problems. Thanks again.

[gamerscircle]

I have a similar issue with my newly modded Fallout New Vegas setup with MO.   I too am/was using the fake full screen executable, but I did setup through MO to be used and it worked once just fine and no more.

 

Someone suggested that I make sure that the the .ini file had the correct 'windowed' setting in the .ini file and what is when I discovered that my FalloutPref.ini was 42mb in size.  Can I simply copy over my 'base' or 'vanilla' .ini file without any ill side affects?

[GrantSP]

The ini files in your MO profiles are just copies of the default inis in your My Documents folder, with some changes you may have made. Copying the original over the expanding error-filled inis is fine, although you will need to add back any specific changes you made to them.

[gamerscircle]

I do only .ini tweaks, thanks for the reply.