weird multiplying mods thing

I haven't played SDV for a goodish while, so when I came back to the game, I had a good bit of mod updating & whatnot to do.
This took up a few days, since I have a fairly low threshold for dealing with that sort of thing in bulk. Yet, as I went on, I noticed that on the SMAPI screen, more and more of my newly refurbished mods were being kicked because I "had multiple copies of it (whichever it was) installed" !!

Where was the game getting this multiple copies thing? I had jettisoned all broken and out of date mods from my Mods folder...!?! I even dumped the saved games that I had previously left over from the last time I had played.

What is going on with this & more importantly, how can I stop it?

 

I am not at all sure that I have discovered the problem, but I have hopes.... Since I needed to do such wholesale updating & changing of my mods, I was hanging out on Nexus & downloaded their new mod handler "Vortex". I used it for a short while, then decided that I did not like the fact that it wanted to store my mods in cloud space.

So... I uninstalled it.

What I did not know was that it had left some files inside a couple of my mods's folders. Soooo, what I think happened was that every time I ran the game to check on how the mods were working, the "leftovers" from Vortex would check the cloud (which I had no direct access to) and decide that there were multiple copies proliferating inside that toxic cloud.

Previously, I had totally removed my mods folder, (still got messages about even further copies made)... uninstalled the game, ran an antivirus & did a complete clean on my PC... shut it down and then restarted and reinstalled the game from Steam... still got the messages... plus found a corrupted copy of my mods folder had appeared in the brand new game.

Sooo.... I dumped all saved games & did a second uninstall & reinstall on the game, and then went offline at Steam and disconnected from my wifi before booting up the game again.

Finally I got a working, clean version of the game (boo hoo to my advanced characters I had dumped & deleated...)

O yeah... before booting the game up again & after I had disconnected my wifi, I combed thru all the folders of all my mods & found various vortex files...which I plucked out and deleated completely. And deleated completely the corrupted mod folder & reinstalled the mods I wanted (a fairly lengthy list, I'm afraid)

SO.... my advice to any and all is this ... if you are going to use Vortex as a mod handler, be aware that it can cause problems. (I really, really hope that I have now cleaned it out of my system) Since I have an "always on" wifi setup at home unless I make a directed effort to disconnect from the router, I now feel vulnerable to whatever may be lurking in those storage clouds so many services use today.