I've had KotOR II installed for several months now and played through it entirely several times already with different characters without any complaints. A few days ago though, I started a new game with yet another new character which started out perfectly fine as well, until I tried to break down items at the workbench. Even though I haven't recently installed any patches and my operating system is exactly the same as it was before, breaking down items suddenly only yielded a fraction of the components it had always yielded before.
Where on the previous runs breaking down a twi'lek spinning blade (with a repair skill of 32 or higher) always yielded 500 components, now it suddenly and without any apparant reason only yielded 150 and most other items seemed to be even worse off, barely breaking the double digits, if at all. Since with yields that low it would make more sense to just sell all my items and try to buy the best upgrades I can find, since even if I'd break down just about my entire inventory I'd still only be able to create maybe 2 or 3 high level upgrades, the whole process of creating upgrades and customizing your weapons and armor (which was always one of my favorite improvement in KotOR II over the original KotOR) becomes rather useless.
Since I could reach the point I had played up to in just a few days of light gaming again I initially just decided to uninstall my current installation of the game and reinstall it from disc, figuring that reinstalling should fix pretty much any problem, especially one so obviously software-related as this one. It didn't though... Even though I haven't played up to the point where I have a twi'lek spinning blade to compare its breakdown with the previous installation, the problem may well have gotten worse. With the help of two machine interfaces my T3 unit already has a repair skill of 28, but a disruptor rifle for example only breaks down into 12 components and I just know that isn't right.
If anyone knows what might cause this odd problem that even a clean reinstallation can't seem to fix and/or knows how it can actually be fixed, I'd be very grateful.