Going to give M&B another go...suggestions

The game isn't very complex so I say go ahead and try some mods, but keep to the 'old' well tested ones. No fun fiddling with bugs. And avoid those who completely change the game - like Custom Settlements. Its' impressive but hard to begin with.

Native Expansion is a good idea or Sword of Damocles or Barren Lands (all close to native).
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,52131.0.html

http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,59651.0.html

Probably a little late to say this, but don't select the save on exit option because then you don't get the choice to save as, although you can make backups of any of your save game files regardless.

Once that save game gets an error, it's done. Good luck getting tech support on it. I'm having this problem right now. Probably over 120 hours game play on this game now, and then I got this error and can't recover my saved game.

One of the most stupid and unrealistic save game policies I've ever seen in a game is the save on exit. Nice and realistic policy, until the save game gets an error on it and then it's forever gone. It's so ridiculous and dangerous, it shouldn't even be offered as an option. Had I known just a week ago what I know now, I would have been making backup copies of my game quite a lot, as tedious as that would have been.

Yeah, it's really recommended to 'save as' once in a while, no matter what save option you chose.
That way you don't have one save game with 200 days of playing that suddenly goes wrong.