Really weird swoop racing bug

[Markus Ramikin 107]

In my current playthrough I got as far as Telos cantina, then when I tried to swoop race, I encountered a bug: my racer was accelerating very rapidly, so that I was able to switch gears every second or so, and finished around 30 seconds (you're supposed to finish around 40s). Has anyone had this before?

 

My attempts to isolate the bug make this even weirder, so I'll list them:

1. First, I checked if a savegame from an older playthrough would have this problem, to know if this is a problem with my whole installation.

Result: no bug.

2. Then I reloaded a savegame from the same playthrough as the bug, but very early: right at the start, before meeting Kreia on Peragus. Then I warped to the Cantina with warp 207tel and raced.

Result: Bug occurred.

3. Then I created a new character, warping to the cantina right from the Prologue, as T3.

Result: No bug.

4. Then I created a new character, skipped prologue, and warped as the actual PC, from Peragus.

Result: Bug occurred. Tested this a couple times.

5. Then I figured maybe something was getting corrupted upon first loading of Peragus, and thought it might be due to whatever file I had most recently edited in my Override folder. I checked, and that was p_atton.utc (I had fiddled with his skill points and attributes a bit). Couldn't see how that could possibly relate to swoop racing, but I took the file out anyway.

Result: No bug from then on from creating new characters and warping. (of course bug still occurred if I reloaded a savegame from the buggy playthrough.) This made me think p_atton.utc is indeed somehow the culprit.

6. I opened the p_atton.utc with kotor tool to see if any problems would be obviously visible. None were. I closed kotor tool. I did NOT save or change the file. I put it back in Override.

Result: still no bug. Except if I reloaded the savegame from the buggy playthrough, of course. But new characters don't seem to be buggy: if I warp to the cantina and race, everything's fine.

And this is very weird, because to the best of my ability to determine, the p_atton.utc file is unchanged. I used it to overwrite my backup of the same file, and it didn't show it as "newer" or anything.

 

Does this make sense to anyone?

 

(Oh, yeah, my mods: TSLRCM 1.8.3, DS transitions, Kill the Ithorian, WCA, some .2da files modified.)