I'm in the middle of a new playthrough of New Vegas. Did a full reinstall recently, added all my mods, and things are going well. But today I made the mistake of trying to install Fake Fullscreen Mode in order to allow me to Alt+Tab. Now, the game won't even open. I get a black box in the corner of my screen that opens and closes within a second, and nothing loads. I know now that the mod I used is outdated, and that GameCompanion seems to be the latest version, but right now I'm just worrying about getting my game to work again.

Tried opening the game with and without NVSE, got new .exe files for both situations, and nothing's working. The mod author also hasn't been active on Nexus since January, so I can't expect a timely response from him.

Does anyone know what might be wrong and how I can fix this? Any help is appreciated.

Are you saying the game is having problems even after you’ve uninstalled the mod, or are you looking for help in getting the mod to work?

isn't fake full screen so old it's not even advised anymore? I use game companion , might be a bit more useable for your purpose.

Calder_Wren wrote:

Are you saying the game is having problems even after you’ve uninstalled the mod, or are you looking for help in getting the mod to work?

I'm saying I've uninstalled the mod but the game is still having issues. It opens for a split second then closes.

Have you tried tinkering with the full screen settings in the launcher to see if the crash is just isolated to one of the options? I can’t remember which settings I play fo4 under but I remember being forced into it because the other would just show a black screen and crash.

Calder_Wren wrote:

Have you tried tinkering with the full screen settings in the launcher to see if the crash is just isolated to one of the options? I can’t remember which settings I play fo4 under but I remember being forced into it because the other would just show a black screen and crash.

The uninstallation instructions say "set back fullscreen in Launcher Options," which amounted to me unchecking the "Windowed" box in the launcher and changing the resolution back. Otherwise, I didn't notice any changes, or anything else to edit. I have no idea what else the damn thing could've done, but whatever it did, it's extremely irritating.

@ONI Agent Locke Hi,

I'm curently using the same fake fullscreen and don't have any problems, but as said a friend of mine, if there's no solution, there is no problem so you may :
• Check the game cache, see in my signature FNV troubleshooting, to ensure game files are in pristine condition.
• Make your game the more vanilla as possible to limit interactions with fake fullscreen, you may have a script conflict so deactivate all your mods, only untick the ones that do not use FNVSE and deactivate those which use FNVSE.
• Ensure there are not any other plugins / files in the FNVSE plugin folder... Then test again to launch.
• If it didn't work, always mods deactivated, install One tweak, it works for FNV too.

Good luck

I have the issue whether or not I use NVSE. Even if I try to launch the game with no mods and through the launcher, it just opens and closes. I've also tried deleting my .ini files, verifying the cache, etc., but the game just will not open. Tried OneTweak, too, but it still closes. I'd hate to have to do a full reinstall, and hate even more if that doesn't solve the problem.

The problem is that the stupid mod was an .exe file, so who knows what the hell it did and where. Gonna try running an antivirus scan overnight and see if that catches anything. Looking at some forum posts on Nexus, seems like some people were picking up that it's a Trojan. Could be just that it's an .exe, and antivirus programs false-flag those all the time, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised at this point.

@ONI Agent Locke

Quote :

The problem is that the stupid mod was an .exe file, so who knows what the hell it did and where.

aaah this is interresting, can you try to extract (right-click and use your archive manager context menun options) the files contained in this exe ? And see what have been pasted on your HDD...?

VIRUSTOTAL SCAN

erebamagi_10 wrote:

isn't fake full screen so old it's not even advised anymore?  I use game companion , might be a bit more useable for your purpose.

I agree, Game Companion is very reliable and totally recommended, the game runs smoothly and you can close the thing easily with alt+f4 if it freezes or some weird-ass bug happens.

when you want to run the game without borders, than start the game in window mode und use swre for faking fullscreen, a lot of newer games allow to hotsample in differnent resolution (21:9, 4:3....). you can choose every resolution you want it.

had no issuses on fallout, skyrim and all other games. an alternate is wbg, but i prefer swre

darkstyler wrote:

@ONI Agent Locke

Quote :

The problem is that the stupid mod was an .exe file, so who knows what the hell it did and where.

aaah this is interresting, can you try to extract (right-click and use your archive manager context menun options) the files contained in this exe ? And see what have been pasted on your HDD...?

VIRUSTOTAL SCAN

Here's the results.

Looks like it was a false flag. The two people who I saw say they got a virus notification said they were using Panda, but it appears that everything else says it's okay. I did a full computer scan with Windows Defender and had 0 viruses.

Gonna try uninstalling and reinstalling the game, but not my mods. I imagine after that, the only two courses of action would be to reinstall EVERYTHING (yuck), or straight up reinstall Windows, the nuclear option.

ElMaldito wrote:

erebamagi_10 wrote:

isn't fake full screen so old it's not even advised anymore? I use game companion , might be a bit more useable for your purpose.

I agree, Game Companion is very reliable and totally recommended, the game runs smoothly and you can close the thing easily with alt+f4 if it freezes or some weird-ass bug happens.

What's better, Game Companion or One Tweak? Can't say I trust Game Companion's author that much after this.

@tdk01 what is "swre", (thanks by advance) ?

Simple Runtime Window Editor (SRWE)
(faking fullscreen for a lot of games and the main reason to use it is hotsampling for taking highres screenshots on newer games, thats supports hotsampling)
personal prefer what you want, swre or editing the ini files to run fallout in borderless fullscreen

All right, so reinstalling the whole game did not work. However, backing up my installation to a separate location, and then reinstalling the game with every single non-vanilla file out of the game's folder, does work. The game is opening.

So it's not like the dumb program installed some kind of "do not work" code deep into my computer, thank God. But then what the heck did it mess with? What else can I attempt before I have to reinstall all my mods?

@ONI Agent Locke you may try this,
• Make a backup of every file you don't want to loose in your game folder.
• Right-click on the ...:\Steam\steamapps\common\Fallout New Vegas folder and delete.
• Delete also every ini files in C:\Users\User\Documents\My Games\FalloutNV.
• Verify game cache, so that Steam re-installs everything from scratch properly.
• Start the vanilla launcher to auto-detect your hardware and let it choose the best settings for your rig.
• Install the DLCs if needed.
• Start the game and test.
• Re-install your mods, FNVSE, etc. and do not use the one that made this mess.

Sounds like the exe might have left some files in your data folder after using it? As the gentleman above suggests, I’d do a clean install of everything except that mod if you can get the game to load now. Hope it works out. It sucks when mods can ruin an install.

ONI Agent Locke wrote:

What's better, Game Companion or One Tweak? Can't say I trust Game Companion's author that much after this.

I suggest using OneTweak, simple .dll and .ini files to NVSE folder and works like it should. Personally I don't really trust .exe files, since they can scew up things like it did with you.

I guess you can use either the one which darkstyler linked or from New Vegas nexus page.

Code:

https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/59266

Okay, I got New Vegas to work, without having to reinstall all my mods.

I moved everything out of my \steamapps\common\Fallout New Vegas folder and backed it up somewhere else. Then I uninstalled the game through Steam, and deleted the \common\Fallout New Vegas folder. Reinstalled the game, and it was working. Copied the \Data\ folder from my backup into the new installation, and it still worked. Installed NVSE, still works. Installed ENB, still works. Everything is functional, NMM is none the wiser, it's all good.

No idea what in the hell that thing did, but at least I got it working again. Well, my road textures don't seem to be working properly anymore. For some reason I always have trouble getting road textures to replace the vanilla ones. But I fix that by turning off Archive Invalidation, loading the game, then turning AI back on, and it works. Weird that it has that issue at all, but at least it's easily resolvable.

Thanks for the help, everyone. One Tweak is working now, too.

@ONI Agent Locke

Quote :

For some reason I always have trouble getting road textures to replace the vanilla ones. Everything else works, but not that.

• Rename temporarilly your data/meshes folder, to ensure you don't have any loose file that loads a different texture. The texture may comes from a loose file or a bsa file.
• Try a selective loading to find which mod interferes and loads the meshe/texture in question.