Balakirev

So clean save's fine, and you rebuilt your Bashed Patch before attempting to play?

You don't have to major any skill you want to raise--they just rise faster. And Mysticism rises very quickly. In fact, you don't even need to major a skill whose attribute is Intelligence. Just get into Alchemy. It's essentially broken: cheap ingredients and an investment in some apprentice equipment, and you'll never fail at making a potion. (In Morrowind, success was tied to your Alchemy skill.) Join the Mage Guilds. Grab the free edibles--their ingredients. Just keep making potions. Sell what you don't want to the Mage Guilds, buy more very cheap ingredients, and keep what potions you do want to use. At 25, 50, 75, and 100 in the skill, there's a dramatic increase in the quality of the potions you make, and also in the money you get from them. Your Alchemy skill will go through the roof, very quickly.

I'm assuming you've already rebuilt your Bashed Patch after BOSS reordered your mods, correct? Now--with your mods reordered, have you reloaded from a clean save? To do this, load your last saved game. Move to an indoor area. Save, and exit the game. Then, load that new saved game. See if the same problems still exist.

True. If you have Lock Times on, BOSS will not re-sort your mods. It will only offer its suggestion for re-sorting (and updating) in its logfile.

I suppose the first question is, have you ever run BOSS--Better Oblivion Sorting Software? I suggest it, if you haven't. The next point is to read the documentation for each of the mods you've applied. I would like to assume you have, but it's surprising how many people don't, and this causes all sorts of anomalies due to incompatibilities between the mods.

I seem to recall that Vilja can heal. She's also a remarkable companion, with tons of character.

If you don't mind a little advice--don't quicksave. Oblivion's quicksaves have been known for years to cause game corruption. As the Oblivion Wiki notes under Tech Support: Stop overwriting existing save files and avoid using Quicksave. Disabling quicksaves will have a dramatic effect in reducing crashes. Or try googling Oblivion, quicksave, and corruption, all at one time, and see what you get. ;)

Morrowind FPS Optimizer doesn't have to launch Morrowind itself. It "recognizes" when Morrowind has been launched, even if you do it through MWSE's Morrowind Launcher. Just be sure you use version 1.96 of the Optimizer, and not 2.0. The latter was done by a different modder, and it's quite buggy. As for MWSE: I've never had any problems with it, and the number of mods that use it is growing steadily. I would caution against using it with MWE (Morrowind Enhanced), a different extended scripting system that was begun around the same time, but later abandoned. MWE has some very nice mods (I especially liked Advanced Journal and Advanced Writing), but it doesn't work well in tandem with MWSE, and there have been occasional reports of unresolved issues on its own. Stick with MWSE.

Just as a suggestion, for the future: if you haven't tried it before, give a thought to BOSS (Better Oblivion Sorting Software). It checks for and mentions the latest versions of mods, incompatibilities among them, and reorders appropriately. If you don't like its preemptive reordering and only want those as recommendations, you can always set Lock Times in Wrye Bash (right click above your mods in the Mods tab and check mark Lock Times).

On Ashara's Sirens and Tritons mod page, there's mention of this file in the description: Consider downloading this, and seeing if it helps while her S&T mod.

I seem to recall seeing comments that the latest Deadly Reflex was buggy, and that there's been a patch. Try checking on this, and if that's not the case, disable DR and see if the game runs. You might also want to post your mod loading order, if nothing else helps.

Lore and mods. These are what set aside the ES series from the standard generic action RPGs.

What happens when you try to enter the FilePlanet site?

Are you running either or both of the expansions? If so, you wouldn't want to use the patch for Oblivion, but for the latest expansion you're running. ...and in any case, never just delete a game. Always uninstall it.

Are you running any mods? If so, a list in your loading order would help. I'm thinking that there are a few mods that clean out the cache, and do it on a timed basis.

I had a negative response to my mod, and wrote to the person who had responded in this fashion ( won't name them). Asked them why. Seems they'd ignored the explicit instructions in my description. It hadn't loaded properly. The result was a thumbs down. To that person's credit, once the mod was up and running--which took literally a minute's time--they removed the thumb's down, and without any request later added a thumb's up. So that turned out well. But some people are just plain trolls, and there's really no way to tell the difference as the system stands. If the system is to be of any use, it has to be based on input that's verifiable and from a reliable source. Perhaps require that only modders can vote, or modders who have been members of TES Nexus for at least a given period of time? I'm thinking of ways, here, to boot out the trolls from the system. To make its responses a truer reflection of each mod.

Dark0ne, I think I've solved the issue. The clue I had was that it only affected large downloads. The only thing that differs between large and small downloads is the recent addition of video ads. I typically run Ad Muncher; have, for years. It never interferes with Nexus download popups, or with the video ads that you run before a large download starts up. But I just disabled Ad Muncher, and the "choose server" screen appeared with the video ad running *concurrently*. When Ad Muncher was disabled, the ad ran as the server info displayed, and as the file downloaded.

Yes. I'm showing up as Balakirev. The problem still exists.

Just today, I tried to download two separate "big" files, House Saitereth, and Vampire Hunting (ESP portion). On both occasions, the screen for downloading that requires a user to select a server site popped up, but was blank. It indicated "done," without and visual content, and though left up for more than 5 minutes, no download ensued. This happened repeatedly over a 4 hour period. Still no downloads. Small downloads, such as Dialog Project for Saphira's Romance, which don't require server selection, immediately popped up the appropriate screen with info about archive type, what to do if a download didn't start, etc. And the download itself started a second later. I've changed nothing in my Firefox 3 settings, nor anything else. I last downloaded any large mod files yesterday. I couldn't find any treatment of this issue elsewhere in the forums, and figured it was appropriate to ask. If I'm in error, and just overlooking something, my apologies.

"You enter X. You look around. You suddenly realize that you must sprint forward, because I wrote it was so." :wallbash: Or, in plain English: "We don't know how to cover all the bases in our quests, so we're going to force you to make the decisions *we* want."

Posting this in an Oblivion forum is a tell as to what kind of response you'll get. Just assume that people *in general* who post in each game forum have an affection for that game, and you'll do fine.

Run4life, I suggest you post your problem in the OOO thread on Bethsoft's own mod forums, or perhaps create a new thread, there. I'm not running OOO, but I am running Fran's, MMM, and about 230 other mods--and have crashes once every 4-5 hours of gameplay. If that. Certainly not due to memory issues, at least, not for me. Try running in a significantly lower resolution--1000 x 728, for example. Switch to Qarl's Redemized, which gives much of the same effect with smaller resolutions, too. If you haven't done this already, run Wrye Bash and build a Bashed Patch, and run BOSS to see if your mod loading order needs shifting around. Check out Oblivion Stutter Remover, as well. It can deal with some CTD issues. The game doesn't handle RAM especially well, as Hickory points out (though it handles it a lot better than Morrowind). A reasonable load shouldn't crash all the time, however. And memory might not be the cause or the sole cause of the problem on your machine. Best to cut down on memory, and get the your load order optimized.

I'd suggest contacting the modder of Put it in its Place. Try sending him a personal message, here. You can also try to reach him at PlanetElderScrolls, here. He hasn't posted in a couple of months, but we all tend to come and go. And I know he was forever seeking feedback.

Avoid the beta; it's not fully stable, yet. Have you had similar problems with other new mods while using OBSE 19? If not, I'd suggest it's a one-off. If it's happened more than once, you probably want to post about this in the lates OBSE thread in Bethsoft's Oblivion mod forum.

It's a slower game, and as has been noted, more immersive. Take your time, and above all, explore. Unlike Oblivion, the great outdoors changes constantly as you move through it, and it's easy to miss important details. Also unlike Oblivion, Mororwind combat is RPG-based, rather than an always-hit FPS. So build up your dexterity. There are tons of great mods, more than in Oblivion, in fact, and the best place to look for them is on PlanetElderScrolls. But check on TES Nexus to see if another, later version exists, and the Nexus has the better comments sections. Bethsoft still has a very active modding forum for the game.