OpenMW refusing to load, showing "bad message" error on Kubuntu

[psi29a]

Strange, using regular 'ol Ubuntu 22.04 without a problem here.

I think there is something else going on.

[Detritus]

I have removed all mods from my openmw.cfg file, and it is starting up normally now. The next step will be to find out which one(s) of the 300+ mods I added to my game is causing the error. So it looks like this has nothing to do with either Kubuntu or OpenMW, but with a mod (or combination of mods) that is causing this error.

Update: I found two mods that were causing the error. Strangely enough it looks like it weren't the mod files themselves causing the error, adding the path to the mod in the openmw.cfg file, without even having the esp selected, already made the error come up. (I have all separate mods in their own directories, and one of the mods was just an esp file). I removed both mods, deleted the existing directories and re-downloaded and installed the mods. Everything is now working fine.

[psi29a]

Something funky going on with the directory names? Possibly some kind of 'foreign' or utf8 (not ascii) directory or file names?

Could you validate that for us what causes this message?

[AnyOldName3]

My guess would be ampersands (&) in a path.

[Detritus]

I am not really sure what happened as it was working before and then it suddenly didn't. One of the paths was: "/home/...../Games/MW_Mods/Patch/Publicans" (removed my login). This is for the Publicans mod (from the author of Patch for Purists, which is why it has been categorised under "Patch").

As said it was working until it suddenly didn't. I deleted the mod and the directory, after which I installed everything again using the same name for the directory just to see what would happen, but this time there weren't any errors and OpenMW started normally. I don't have enough knowledge of how the paths work or if anything corrupted without me being able to see this, so I can't give any more information.

Something else that happened around the same time is that Steam started to show the "updating steam" message every time I start it. As I didn't connect the two together I didn't mention it before. Can this also have been caused in the same way?

[AnyOldName3]

If your username doesn't have " and doesn't have & in it, I can't see any way for that path to have got broken.

[Detritus]

Neither can I. I'm now starting to wonder if something got somehow damaged or corrupted, but the checks I did show my HDD is ok.