So a couple of days ago I bought Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I installed it, played for some time. Then I opened Skyrim and suddenly all the textures were messed up (looked detailess and white). I closed the game and checked the Data files, and boom, the texture files, the mods, everything was labeled as Morrowind Plug-ins. I went and uninstalled Morrowind, but the Data files were still labeled as Morrowind Plug-ins, and the problem persisted.
Any help guys?
EDIT: So I know that you all would think of reinstalling Skyrim, which makes sense, but here is the thing. I am on a vacation in my village. It came as a kind of surprise that I coudn't install Wi-fi, so no Steam. (Sorry for not mentioning this earlier, guess I have to return to the city.)
Best Answer
Windows bases file associations on the extension, not on the file content. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim mods have differences in internal structure, but all have the same extensions,
.esm(Elder Scrolls Master),.esp(Elder Scrolls Plugin), and.bsa(Bethesda Softworks Archive). So installing the construction set for one game will overwrite any file associations set up by the other games.This doesn't affect the games themselves. They don't care about the windows file associations and each one has its own, independent list of files to load. So you can still play Skyrim just fine even if windows thinks that all of its files belong to Morrowind.
It does affect what happens if you double-click on the files, so if you want to edit Skyrim mods, you'll need to do it by opening the Skyrim construction set and then loading the files from there, rather than just double-clicking on the plugin file.
To fix this, you'll need to either reinstall the Skyrim construction set, or manually change the file associations for each file -- but this is only a partial fix, because now all the Morrowind files will show up as belonging to Skyrim. This is an intrinsic limitation of the way windows handles file associations.