My gosh, it's such a rare problem, it's almost relieving to find someone else who's dealing with this. I haven't played in weeks; Xaihady's sitting at Heljarchen with a discolored head and missing me :'(
This just doesn't make sense. At all. And it freaks me out. I've found threads as early as last June trying to resolve this problem, but they all die out with no solution. If steam had a bad copy on their server, wouldn't everyone installing have this? >_<
I've installed on different drives, updated my video card, defragmented, cleaned, and error-checked my drives, uninstalled and reinstalled the CK, disabled and cleaned out Steam Cloud, and removed everything that could ever possibly be related to the game, including NMM and Boss and Wrye Bash and Et cetera, just for good measure.
Resigning myself to brief defeat, I implemented a number of body, head, and skin mods. Every single mod set that was supposed to eliminate neck seams (and according to hundreds of people, did the job flawlessly) was still subject to this nonsense.
The only thing I can think of is the two folders sitting on my desktop, holding my old saves and edited plugins. There's no way on earth I'm deleting those, but I honestly have no place to put 11 gb ^^'
If getting those out of my system doesn't help, the only thing left is to hunt through every friggin' folder and file on my friggin' computer for the a**hole of a file that's dicking with my game.