WHAT HAS HAPPENED HERE! Morrowind CTD'd (as usual, nothing out of the ordinary for me.) no real difference in how it did it. But starting it back up, i get an error message "cannot locate [insert name].bik file!" I get the choice to run it, but it wont start! (whether i choose 'yes' or 'yes to all' (cancel).

Can someone tell me how to fix this short of spending the next 2 years redownloading mods from the internet with my 56k modem? Can i replace just the missing file? I still have installation cds and everything, but i cant seem to find the files in any of the folders on its installation directory... havent checked the CD yet.

Copy your save games and plugins, then reinstall. What you've lost is the intro movies. Without them, the game will not start properly.

so i cant just pull the movie files off the morrowind cd?

You probably can, but I don't think it's a problem of deleted files. If they were gone, Morrowind would not have been able to start to CTD. I can't think of any way files would get deleted between the crash and restarting the program. More likely, something caused a problem with the reference to the location of them.

Simplest solution is just a reinstall. Copy your plugins and save files somewhere first, and you'll be back to playing faster than it would take to find and fix the problem.

Thanks Peregrine! Will this reset all the settings in MW? And do i have to reinstall tribunal/bloodmoon expansions too? Or can they just be copyed and moved?
Reason for asking is an incessant (yet sporadic) problem with complete system lockups (it's in this forum, dont know where any more) and was told that i should reformat the whole hard drive (not an option, with the stuff i have on mine...) so would this have the same effect?

Edit: Never mind what i asked, i went ahead and reinstalled... unfortunately, my screen resolution isnt the same anymore, and i dont remember how i changed it... can someone tell me how i did this 1 1/2 years ago? My memory sucks...