FL crashes on startup if you have any modded savegames in your saves folder. Having a savegame where you have a Jedi Starfighter will cause FL to crash 'cause it reads all the savegames to see where you are, what ship you have and how much cash you have. When it reads the ship in your save it will not be able to find it in shiparch or any of the .dlls 'cause the mod has been removed so it crashes.
To sort it out you will have to delete all of your modded savegames (or just move them somewhere else - you never know you might want that Jedi Starfighter back some day
). They are in a directory called ...\My Documents\My Games\Freelancer\Accts\SinglePlayer. Just wipe/move any saves from after you got the mod.
If you get FLMM 1.2 it automatically sorts out this problem by keeping saves from different mods in different directories.
EDIT - Just noticed you question about retaining your level. No you will have to go back to the best non modded save you had. If you are really bothered about it you could get a savegame editor and try and transfer things such as your level/cash etc from the modded save to an unmodded one but i suspect it will be easier and more fun just to play from the start again.
Also you should consider looking around at the mods on offer and picking another one then playing from the start. There are a good variety of mods out there and personally i couldnt imagine playing unmodded FL ever again.
Edited by - redeye on 23-07-2003 03:54:28