Medieval 2: Kingdoms; steam to non steam game

[Lotiiion]

So for a little background on my issue, I have played and modded my steam version of Medieval 2 Total War with kingdoms a bunch of times by just changing the names and everything, but recently I decided if I was going to mod so much I might as well just get the non steam version and play mods as I please (I understand this could have been stupid of me but it was $14 on Amazon). So I bought the Gold version of Medieval 2 off of Amazon, uninstalled from Steam and deleted all of the folders associated with the game. When the download finally finished some 4 hours later I noticed that all of the mods I ever installed were on the list in the launcher, I thought "Well ok that's strange" but I ignored it and started the normal game which worked perfectly fine. Then I went in to play one of he expansions to test if it worked, I tried all of them and got the same "an exception has occurred error" or somewhere along those lines. So I researched, and was told to delete all history of the game and I did so there are no traces of the game. I reinstalled the game, still getting the same error with the mods all still listed. So I believe this is 100% a Kingdoms problem rather than a Medieval 2 problem. If anyone can tell me some files I'm missing in the "regedit" application let me know because I've been hunting for days now. This is pretty much my last resort here so please let me know what I can do!

[CavalryCmdr]

When you removed the game and mods did you run a registry cleaner?

[Mesa]

I was also thinking about doing this as it seems to be easier with modding. Difference is I bought the boxed copy in the same way becaue it's cheaper than Steam, but just used the CD key on Steam.

If I need a registry cleaner can someone recommend me one? CCleaner has messed my PC up before.

[CavalryCmdr]

My Anti-Virus includes a registry cleaner, so I have no suggestion there.
However, Steam's latest update allows mod-foldering without messing with the registry and will run mods just like the disk version, just point it to Medieval2.exe instead of Kingdoms.exe. In short, with the latest update the Steam version is just as mod (and modder) friendly as the disk version, or even moreso. The reason I suggested the Registry Cleaner is for the Launcher, which will list mods in the registry, and will try to launch them as the registry tells them they are installed (thus if the Kingdoms campaigns are still in the registry after you un-install and you try to launch them with the Launcher it will look for them where they were previously installed.) This should cause no issue with the Steam version or if you are not attempting to use the Launcher to run mods/expansion campaigns.