Can't speak with villager/guard NPC anymore

[mikki]

Hello all. I got a bug where I couldn't speak with any random npc, like guard or random villager on the city after I take A Woman Scorned quest. Whenever I approach one, the only thing I could do is pick pocketing them. I have looked through google, discussions etc and while I agree that the random npc doesn't matter enough to talk to, it does rob me the immersion that I had before, talking to stranger about their lives or their stupid, incompetent lord. I have tried save/reloading, restart the game, do a prompt activity (eating stew, sleeping), or reloading old saves, but it doesn't matter, and by God I won't reinstall the game because then I would download 50+gb files again. Does anyone have a fix to this problem?