Vanilla GOTY ed. New Game CTD

[SirTiddlywinks]

So for no explicable reason last week while playing Oblivion through Steam, shortly after taking a new character out of the sewers (I was in the little elven ruins across the water if I remember correctly), the game crashed with the typical Windows 7 "This program has ceased to respond" message, and went to desktop. I was running a small number of mods at the time including OBSE mods, but never had those issues before with the same mod set when I played this last year. I figured I was just too hasty throwing them all on their in bad load order or something so I deactivated them all, except for the Official DLC and expansions. Any attempt to load any of my saves was met with immediate crash. I deactivated all DLC and expansions. Same thing happened. So I tried making new characters. I was able to customize and name my characters fine. As soon as I hit "Done" to finalize and move over to the cell door and talk to that dark elf, the game would crash the same way.

I decided to start from scratch. I totally wiped my system of all Oblivion everything and re-installed the game from my backup folder (which was made from Vanilla with no saves and no alterations). Checked cache integrity, that was good. Started the vanilla game, and the same thing happened after finalizing a character. As soon as the actual "game" started, the whole thing would just crash to desktop again.

I am running Windows 7 64 bit.
The game, Oblivion GOTY Edition, is installed in my default directory (A:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Oblivion)
I have no plugins, mods, or any other additions/changes applied to the game or any of its folders.

This CTD issue persists regardless of where I start the game from. Please somebody, help! I enjoy this game very much and I'd like to be able to play it again :smile:

This is as far as I can get without crashing, not counting for those old saves I had tried to load.

[SirTiddlywinks]

Fixed. Found two lingering 1kb .txt files in an "Oblivion" folder under "My Documents" on the storage drive and deleted them. I'm guessing they were placed there by an old mod or something as it was outside my install directory. The game is now running without a hitch. Phew!