Jenrai

Heya Prz; Whilst I'm thinking your issues may have been related, I can pretty much assure you BOSS didn't fix yours, unless you've uploaded the wrong files. Check them for yourself, they're the exact same order. And thats all that BOSS changes, it doesn't touch anything in your game, so it must be something else. Did you have the same crash outside Skingrad itself? If so, did you ever have the Old Crow Inn installed? (I know you don't now but that might not mean a right lot if it recorded a change to the cell before you created your current string of saves) How many times did it happen for you? On your map it looks more like a land tear, because of the jagged, straight edge to your current cell. That shouldn't happen. You should be able to see into the cell, at least on the map, unless something is stopping that cell from loading completely. If I remember correctly, doesn't one of the DLC's mod that area too? I no longer have them as I d/led them on an older computer and the site has gone bye bye (thank you very much Bethesda. Grrrr...) and I unfortunately can't find the receipts. I not saying the DLC is broken but its possible theres a conflict with another mod. Jenrai

Everybodies right! Yes its possible. Yes Bash is the ultimate tool for using more mods than the limit. But thats not because it merges loads. Its because it makes them work together better, as in not against each other. No, you can't just "Bash groups of ten"... oh, so I guess not everyone's right then. nvm. We were close. Basically, rather than botching them together using the CS, get TES4 Gecko or Edit. Unless you're 99% certain you know what you're doing. Or just want an easy life. These two are much, much quicker than individually merging mods. Words of caution: Don't merge UL. There's a damn good reason all the Unique Landscapes have their own esps. Some of them can be merged with their own patches. They cannot be merged with one and other. You've been warned. Don't merge mods that change the same people: This would seem to make sense, wouldn't it? Two mods that make changes to say, Audens Avidius? Merge em. Well it doesn't make sense. Particularly not if they are scripted. Whilst both Edit and Gecko can merge scripts ( I think) I've seen some funky affects therein. Dun do it. Now the good news: Got 50 armor mods? Merge em. Especially if they are litterally, just armour and/or weapons. These aren't generally huge mods, and the esps are relatively small and quite straightforward. Works like a charm. As long as the all have independant IDs and filenames. Which they should. Got quest mods? These are mergable too. As long as they aren't making changes to the same people (see above) or areas, yep, quest mods can be safely merged. Of course, making 20 - 30 merged esps is going to shoot your load order apart as far as Boss is concerned (because you are best giving them new names so you know what you're doing... and for pity's sake, please don't delete the original esps if you've not kept the zips! :D ) so the best bet would likely be to merge them following your load order, and add entries as needed to your Masterlist.txt (yep, that one that comes with Boss). Its really easy to edit, all you need is any text editor program (including windows own wordpad. Yes its cr*p but it'll work for this) and the name of the first mod in your merge. Be aware though that animation mods made with the CT template will all overwrite each other's crystals and spells, leaving you with only the ones last in the merge (or set as the primary) and that if you merge race mods your saves are gonna look messed up. They're not, you just need to point the save to rely on the new merged mod, rather than the individual race, but they'll appear screwed at first if you don't. Of course, if you're confident in the CS (sorry if that sounds like a dig, but "I can bumble my way around" doesn't exactly scream confidence to me) you'll be more able to fix any problems you might accidentally create... and merging them, whilst it takes more time (read - a LOT more time) by hand means you're more likely to know exactly whats going on and where, you're also much more likely break something critical if you don't know exactly what you're doing, whereas Gecko and Edit have failsafes to prevent that (I'm not saaying they're flawless. Don't go thinking you can botch together your entire load order into one uber-esp and if it lets you merge them it'll work) Anyways... long story short (bit late for that, I know. =) ) Yes, its possible. I normally use Gecko to merge and currently have, I would estimate, about 340 to 350 mods loading, if you count merges. Good luck. And take it easy. Less haste more speed. :D Jenrai

Ahh... the TESCS... fantastic tool... unfortunately held together by paperclips. Cheap ones at that. :D When you say you change appearance, how do you mean? Do you mean the charectors appearance doesn't change in the render window, or that your changes don't stick in game? For in-game changes not sticking there could be a lot of potential reasons, so I'll pretend for now I've not thought of that and direct you to The Construction Set Wiki's home page as it can answer more of your questions in more sense than I can, and my fingers won't be bleeding by the time I've finished this post. The section on charector creation will be handy for you, methinks, even though it mainly deals with starting new charectors from scratch, in principle, its the same thing. Now, if you mean they aren't changing in the CS itself, yeah, thats a known bug. I don't know if theres a fix for it, but I think the work-around is opening the full char-gen window before you open the face one. Basically, when you open the charector, even if you just want to change the face, open the body tab first. Or something like that. Welcome to the wacky world of Oblivion modding, matey. Jenrai

Heh heh heh. Sorry if you thought I was addressing you like a bit of a noob then... (re-reading that, I guess I was... oopski.) I always thought TSS/CM would battle the bejesus out of each other's scripting, so I only use CMs. I know it means you're limited to just recruiting partners, not anyone like you can with TSS, but hey, theres like... more than I even want to attempt to count, plus I make my own... And at level 30+ and with FCOM installed, almost everyone you can recruit from the game world is gonna last about 6 seconds once the fighting starts... better off with CMs in my humble opinion. Jenrai

Cyro's Ordinator Lite works. I have it (mainly because its a requirement for one of my FCOM,plugins but it does look pretty funky anyways. :D ) If you've tried that one and have problems with the helm, read the readme. I'd guess its because you don't have the Bonemold helmet that it requires. Happy hunting. Jenrai

Hmm... the problem isn't Katana's or Japanese style swords mate... there's millions of em. The problem is sheathing a one-handed weapon on your back. Oblivion doesn't like doing this (hence it doesn't contain a one-hand weapon from back draw anim by default, afaik) It likes putting Claymores, Great Axes, and various other 2-H stuff there though, so hey, it can be done. With UV you can put any damn thing you want on your back (as long as you are dual weilding and its in your off-hand) but that very feature is still a lil glitchy. Ohm... If you know anything about moddeling, I'm quite sure it will be possible to get one of the regular mods that contains Katanas, find a Dai-Katana model from it (typical 2 handed equivallent, though there are others. Lets not get into the whole debate about swords. Usually ends up with some seriously comical arguments. People just take that stuff waaaaay too seriously) which should sheath on the back of your toon if its made like regular 2h weapons, then switch it to 1h in Nifskope or something like it. Problem is, unless you can animate too, the drawing motion is going to be seriously rough. Your toon will likely draw it with both hands then switch t to 1h. I'd help, but to be brutally honest, I really do suck at modelling. :( Good luck in your search. Jenrai

Sorry mate, this flew down the pages and I missed it. There may be a much simpler answer to this than we were thinking of anyways then, if its only freaking out when you change the face. Do you have any other cosmetic mods loading in the CS at the time? As in, are you trying to use features from another mod? If so, its crash because one of the Construction Sets many faults is that it doesn't like making .esps that rely on other .esps. It tries to "orphan" (remove the master file requirement) when it tries to save your new plug-in, if its master is an .esp, resulting in the crash, I think. Regardless wether I'm right or wrong about why it does it, it can't save an .esp thats dependant on another .esp. Master file requirements are a real pain in the ass to remove, so the best way to do it is actually to change the file that it requires. How to do this for modding: 1 - Get TES4Edit, Gecko, or Wrye Bash. 2 - Open said utility and find the .esp with your cosmetic resources. If you're using Gecko, open it, select "copy to master" (or whatever - don't remember exactly but its something like that) and change the needed file to an ESM. If you're using Wrye, scroll down your load list to the mod, right click, and select "ESMify self" ... if you're using Edit, I'm afraid you'll have to read the docs (like you shouldn't anyway! :P ) because I use Gecko and Wrye, so whilst I have TES4 Edit, I only ever use clean/check/merge my work. 3 - Open the CS. Load your esp as the active mod. Load the ESM you just made the cosmetic mod into as well. 4 - Make your changes. Save. *crosses fingers and prays to the Night Mother it works* 5 - Close the CS. If you used Wrye to esmify the mod, espify it. If Gecko, you're still got the esp, so remove the new esm from your load order. (better to remove it from the data folder entirely, but save it in case you ever want to do something similar again. Save you having to esmify it all over again) 6 - Use your utility of choice to change the master of your new plugin to the original cosmetic .esp 7 - Playtest. Shoulda worked. Hope that makes sense. Good luck. Jenrai

Right off the bat you might want to check the endorsements/uploads threads and any threads on here or the Bethsoft Forums regarding your sound mods to see if this is a known issue, if you haven't already. I'm thinking thats a whole lotta sound mods, and they are bound to have some degree of conflict. If that doesn't help, my personal thinking would be to check out your hardware first. Mainly because I'm better at troubleshooting that than I am mods probably, but hey. Do you use an onboard sound system, or a soundcard? Either way, check see if there is driver error, or newer drivers available for your sound system, and make sure (if you have a soundcard) that your onboard sound is disabled through your BIOS. You can disable it in windows, but windows (particularly XP - dunno about Vista/7) has an entertaining habit of deciding your don't know what you are doing and re-activating it, without telling you. If you're around... oooh 2000% certain you've no conflicting mods, then you definately have a hardware/driver problem. Reinstall the drivers. (Do a complete uninstall of them first. I know your computer will tell you thats not a smart thing to do, but it is, trust me. Hell, your computer will quite happily toddle off and find the original drivers for you anyway if you break something) You're likely to have problems running a desktop without a soundcard anyway, simply because of how much of a resource hog Oblivion (particularly when its modded, and definately when its modded to a large extent) is. Onboard sound needs to fight, for lack of a better terminology, everything else on your motherboard for critical resources, and because Oblivion is gobbling up those resources anyways, its gonna loose that fight. Usually via a second round knockout to your graphics system. Once more in English? Oh, ok then - most Oblivion (or any game, for that matter) sound problems start in graphics-intensive situations, rather than sound intensive ones, unless theres a problem with one of the actual sound files. But the end of that situation rarely (if ever) ends the issue. Suggested mod conflict test/fix: 1 - Disable offending sound mod. 2 - Make a clean save. Ideally indoors. Even disabled, that mod will still affect your game, unless you install it via BAIN or OMOD. (Clean Save = Go somewhere you know the mod doesn't affect, save, deactivate the mod and overwrite the save) 3 - Update your Archive invalidation. 4 - Playtest. Do any other sounds loop? If no, sorry to say it but you were either overworking your system or you had a mod conflict. 5 - Re-enable the mod. Does it start again? Does it start straight away (or at least as soon as the effect should play)? Or does it not start until, for example, you hit something when outside in a Storm? If it starts when you hit something its a combat conflict, likely with that combat sounds mod you mentioned. But honestly... it could be with anything that affects combat. It doesn't necessarily have to be another sound mod. If the looping stops after a clean save, its a mod conflict, and you're likely better off without that mod. If you figure its an absolute must have, you're going to need to start going through your sound mods one by one to find out whats on the other end of the conflict. If you don't find it, start going through other mods. Its quite possible that mods that don't even touch your sounds folder can do this - like opening menus with more than one weather mod installed has a nasty tendancy to change the weather. I know, its a known glitch with some of them, but I've also copped for it running two because I thought I'd give it a whirl (liked the storms on one, the fog/mist on the other) and neither had that glitch when running solo. Ho hum. Good luck matey, hope you get to the bottom of it. Jenrai

First off you're welcome matey. :) Good luck with your issues. The card's own controller should always be used, to make sure everything is speaking the same language, so to speak. The real explanation for that is somewhat more technical, but hey, I'm not gonna spend all day typing that up and expect others to understand it when I don't. Its surprising how many people don't use it, usually because they use different settings for different games, or simply because they just don't know how to. It always quite straightforward, and most newer control systems have the ability to create profiles for all your games. Whilst not using it won't cause your computer to erupt in balls of flame, it will make your gpu have to work a little harder whilst you're running games, and that can negatively impact the performance and lifespan of your card. Hope you get it sorted. Jenrai

... You are aware that TV only runs at 25fps, yeah? Thats tops. And only in America. If you're in the EU, its 20... Just thought I'd point it out. I'll look into what's making your comp tick when I've got a little more time on my hands. Hope someone comes up with somethin fer you soon. Jenrai

Its possible the mod or something else gave your in-game graphics settings a bit of a nudge in the wrong direction. Try rebuilding your .ini (I hope you made a note of any of your customisations in there) or alternatively just reset all your graphics options to minimum. Then slowly start rebuilding your settings to how you want the game to look, testing between each change. Use your graphic card's own controller system (eg The Nvidia Control Panel or ATI's Catalyst) for changes where possible - this should be for pretty much everything except in game texture sizes and shadows, plants and water detail. Its also quite possible that your GPU is on its way to silicon heaven. If you play other (high-demand) games do you notice any glitches or slow downs with them? This could also be a symptom of your monitor running on the extreme fringes of its capabilities, but seeing as neither Oblivion nor any other game should have the ability to make that happen we'll pretend I didn't say that for now. Hope you get it sorted. Jenrai

Did you read the read-me, or the description, before installing Immersive Interface? I'd guess not, as thats exactly what its supposed to do. O.O Anyways... as is the way with most interface altering mods, a lot of the changes they make edit things in your .ini Go to my documents -> my games -> Oblivion and find your .ini, or configuration file, if you prefer. Make a note of all your custom changes to it - usually things like turning off borders, face gen texturing alterations, stuff like that, - and rename the file. This'll force Oblivion to make a new one (remember the new one isn't saved until you quit the game) and sweep away any settings changes. Unfortunately, it'll also reset any camera & crosshair mods you have (you'll need to reinstall those) and your graphics settings, unless you use your graphics card's control system to change them, which you should do anyway. I'm not promising this will fix it but its an easy step, and should be the first troubleshooting step you take whenever you have a problem with Oblivion as it rectifies a lotta things, even some things it really shouldn't. Good Luck. Jenrai

Lol. Annndd... off he goes again! I was wating for that. :wink: Just kidding mate. It is a top list, seriously, and if anyone reading this hasn't checked out all or at least some of those mods, go now. Now. Go on. What? Still here? Oh, ok then. Just a thought though, Mega... why not make an article on the Nexus file servers and link to that instead of pasting all the list? Or link to one post with the list in it? Sorry... back to my original point of posting... Yep, installing FCOM can be a real pain in the backside, but as stated, its more than just worth it. Along with DR (Deadly Reflex by SkyCaptain) and UV (Uneccesary Violence by Hex_Off) if it wasn't for FCOM I'd have stopped playing Oblivion a good while ago. More than anything its the little things that make a difference with FCOM... the Guards wearing different armours (without it looking like its a non-uniform day at a primary school, or they're actually guarding an LA 'adult store'... ahem.), more weapons, more random (yet sensible) behaviour from NPCs... stuff like that. And theres lots and lots and lots of those little changes. My first playthrough with FCOM I played it without any other mods installed, and I also have the game for my 360, so I realised probably more than most a lot of those little differences. Of course, now I'm running somewhere near the mod limit, and if I unmerged all the mods I've merged, well over it... easilly in excess of 350 mods... how it runs at all is a mystery to me, but it does, and its just as great, if not even better, than it was in that first playthrough on the 360, all that time ago... So yeah, installing mods and getting them all to work can be ballbreaking, but its more than worth it. Happy hunting Jenrai

Wait wait wait... Hello... sorry, me again. :D So, if someone was to release, say, a modder's resource of EGT's, one batch of them (ie - take all the egts for one race and rename them... i dunno... resource.egt) wherein all these 150+ tga's were for example, pure black, just how likely is that to actually fix neckseams? Or at least reduce them significantly? Whilst I don't doubt for one minute that you know more about this stuff than I do, or that recoulouring every single one of those textures would be long, tedious (if not necessarily hard) work, I just find it sort of staggering to believe that if its actually that straightforward, its not been done. I mean this in the nicest way possible, and I know modding is all about personal tastes and its against my nature to even think about telling people "this shouldn't do that! That shouldn't be there!" or whatever, but seriously, I've seen and even played some mods that must have taken the authors (who doubtless have more skill than me at this stuff) absolutely years to create and I've been left thinking"Wtf man? What was the bloody point?!?!" ... yet if someone were to release a mod that fixed body seams entirely, it would likely take them less time, and be the greatest mod, ever! It would likely also be the most understated mod ever, but hey, I'm sure you know what I mean. Maybe I'm missing the whole difficulty of just how hard re-texting these files is or something, I dunno. Modelling has never been my forte. Jenrai

Oldblivion, as I understand it (and I'll be the first to admit thats probably not all that well) is essentially a huge downgrade of Oblivions engine and particularly, graphics, to enable it to run on older hardware. Therefore there are a heckuva lotta mods that ain't gonna run too well with it. Especially those that change or enhance the general visuals of the game. So I would have to say yep, your problem is mod related, though I can't give you much more specific info than that. If you post your load order someone around here may be able to help, but I think the Oldblivion home page & forums might be a better place to start. Sorry I couldn't be of more use matey. Jenrai

First off - whenever you install any mod, read the read-me. Keep the zips handy of EVERY mod you install for troubleshooting purposes. You're only gonna have problems later if you don't. Plus you'll have that all important read-me handy, right there in the zip. Thats not a dig at you, I just see an awful lot of people asking questions that I know for a fact are answered right there in the mod's own docs. Failing that, check the mod's upload thread and description. If anyone else has run into problems or has similar concerns to you, they'll like as not be mentioned there. Now, onto the nitty-gritty stuff. Will you loose her? No. You get a pair of rings when you install the mod, if its installed correctly. One will teleport you to your companions. The other will teleport them to you. Notable exceptions include if you've told her to stand guard (she's working and therefore won't move - funky for adding guards in-game to your players residence) or if you tell her to wait somewhere (eventually she'll get bored, wander around the surrounding area, and after a long while might even decide to potter off home - back to where you found her in the first place) Will she level up? Yepo. Default CM partners script makes them level up at the same rate you do, -1. So when you level to 2, she'll still be level 1. When you hit 3, she'll be level 2, and so on and so forth. There's a shedload of unique and story driven partners out there, and that I'm not going into. I'd be here all week. Read the docs. Does Oblivion XP affect this? As far as I know, no. And its not supposed to. The only thing that Oblivion XP should affect is the PC. Spells n stuffs. There are mods for it, but by default I think most partners come with ways of healing themselves. And then theres the vanilla spells for healing and buffing targets that can be used to compliment this. Stacking health buffs and shield buffs (as long as the spells have different names or they won't stack) can turn a simple warrior CM into a helluva tank that can keep a whole lotta enemies busy whilst you do your sneaky thing. Additionally, they'll automatically use most beneficial potions you give them on themselves, as well as using poisons on your enemies. Just try not to hit your partners with too many area attacks. They get a bit peeved at you after a while if you do. Will they die? Depends what version of the mod you use. Theres two. First one being the normal version, in which case no, they won't. They're set to essential, so they'll only get knocked out. They'll be up and about again in no time. But sriously, wheres the fun (or for that matter, realism) in that? So I use the NE versions. Stands for Non-essential. Yep, they'll die. *sobs* Wait... why am I crying? Its usually me that kills them! Other handy mods Don't even get me started. Theres millions. Custom Partner mods with and without stories, mods that give them horses (this can lead to other problems though - you've been warned), mods that allow them to ...well, basically, if you think your partners should be able to do something that they can't, there's probably already a mod for it. You just have to be quite patient in trawling the file servers for through the 1000's of mods that searching for CM or Partners or any variant of the two will give you. Happy hunting. Jenrai

Heya fellas; Two things. Firstly - Did you download the Francesco's New Items & Creatures BSAs? The seperate, somewhat larger file, it contains all the meshes and textures. If you didn't downoad it, get it. Secondly, have you recently rebuilt your .ini? Doing so will 'unregister' the BSA from your Oblivion .ini, causing it to fail to load. Open your Oblivion.ini (also known as a configuration file) in the My Documents -> My Games -> Oblivion folder. Not the one in the default directory. Don't tamper with that unless you know exactly what you are doing. Hell... don't tamper with it anyways. Back on topic. Search the .ini for the word "Archive" ... this should take you to the BSA section of your .ini, where you will see the default Oblivion BSA's loaded. Things like Oblivion-Textures.BSA. Is there a line for Fran's BSA present? If not, navigate to your data folder, and find the Fran's BSA. Write down its name exactly as it is shown. I think its Franewitems.bsa, at least in English, but don't quote me on that. Add the name as you wrote it to the end of the archive line. make sure there's no full stop/periods ( these = . ) on the end of the line, but a comma instead, and add the name AFTER the last default BSA. If it is: Look at the start of the name of the Fran's BSA. Or rather, right before it. There should be a comma ( one of , ) there. My bet is that you'll see a comma AND a full stop. Delete the full stop. That tells Oblivion it can stop loading BSAs. It is in fact, completely redundant because of the way Oblivion operates - just don't register the BSA if you don't want it to load. Shimple. Hope that helps. Jenrai

Ah-ha! Thats the one I couldn't remember for the eyes. Googlyness. Thank you LFact. :) Whilst we're at it, just politely ignore the fact I told you to open the CS before esmifying the plug in. Just forget I said that. Said what? Nevermind. I didn't say anything. Jenrai

As for how to texture your own eyes, I'm definately the wrong person to offer advice on that. I completely suck at modelling (lack of creative artistic ability? Possibly. I fail at drawing and painting too. :D) however, if you already have the eye packs, and as long as they are for the correct eye mesh, I can tell you how to add existing textures to a race that doesn't normally come with it. Open the CS. You'll want the race plugin set as your "active" esp, and the one with the eyes in loading as well. First step: Use Wrye Bash/TES4Edit or similar to "ESMify" the esp that has the eyes and stuff in, if its not already an ESM - the CS doesn't always like making ESPs that rely on other ESPs - load the master (esm) file version of the plug-in, with your race plug in. (the race still needs to be the active file) Second: Find the main window for the eyes selection you got. It should have all the eyes from the vanilla game, and any plug-in you've loaded into the CS in it. Third: Open your race. Double click on the race name. Fourth: Drag and drop your selected eyes from the eye window into the race's eye selection. Word of warning - There are (at least) two different eye meshes. If you apply the textures from one to the wrong mesh, you'll get some funky effects. (black eyes, purple eyes, invisible eyes - the usual "missing texture" stuff) Save it. Fifth: Save it. (did I mention that already :grin: ... Can't emphasize this enough... EVERY change you make in the CS, save. Its glitchy as hell and you will loose work if you don't. Highly annoying when you forget and do an hours work then try and save and it crashes) Sixth: Close the CS, open TES4Edit, Wrye Bash, whatever program you used to esmify the esp in the first place. Change your new race plug-in to recognise the ORIGINAL ESP as its master - If you used eyes/hairs whatever from the esm you made, it'll be looking for that, not the esp. Alternatively, change all your plug-ins that look for the original race esp to look for the comsetic esm you made it into in step 1. (NOT advised unless you know exactly what you're doing; can cause issues with future downloads that rely on the esp & not your new esm) You could just leave both the esm and esp in your load order, but this is quite liable to cause you dual loading issues, such as ref ID errors. seventh: Depending on the step you took above; cut & paste the ESM away from your data folder (to avoid afforementioned dual loading errors) You could delete it, but then you'll have to go through all that again if you want to make any further changes. Or - Reove the Esp if you're quite happy repointing all your future plug ins to use that esm instead. I'd go for the first option but really its down to whatever you're most comfortable doing, as is nearly eveything else with modding. :) By the way, if you're really looking at getting into modding/using mods, and want to know whats going on, bookmark The TES Construction Set wiki homepage in my humble opinion the best modder's guide there is when it comes to Oblivion. Happy Modding. Jenrai

If your computer is telling your graphics card that the 24" monitor is your primary monitor, and the one to run the game on, I don't think Oblivion should have a problem with that 19" one. I've just started running mine on a 32" HDMI TV (lol, I know. Slight overkill :D) I actually only got this to watch DVDs on when I'm in bed. My room's small and I don't have room for my Computer and a TV, so I combined the two. I only go slightly crosseyed when sat in front of it playing games :D but I defo think the tradeoff is worth it. Anyways, back to my point. I do have a monitor still kicking around somewhere that I can hook up to it to play around with and see if I can recreate your problem. What card & drivers are you running? Just so we know if the comparison is actually going to be worth doing, if no one comes up with anything in the meantime. Jenrai

Ah, the curse of onboard graphics. (forgive me if you're running a laptop) The major problem, even if yours did support hardware T&L, is that it would be fighting your Processor, RAM and other things for attention, which will throttle your performance. Unfortunately, even though its 4 years old, Oblivion is still a major graphic power hog. Even Oldblivion I fear, is gonna be a bit too much for that chipset. Ok, I'm being nice. Its gonna be a lot too much. Especially if you start modding it. Best advice matey, at least if you are running on a desktop, would be to get a graphics card. Obviously, the top of the range ones are really rather bank crunchingly expensive, so I'm not saying get one of those. Hell - I don't. And I make these bloody things(PCs) to put a few extra quids in my pocket. Thats not to say I wouldn't get a top of the range one if money was no object, mind. Regardless, my personal comp pretty much eats my cousins Alienware (desktop, not lappy) for breakfast and it didn't cost me half as much to put together. Before anyone points out how evil gloating like that makes me, I did tell him I could build a comp that would last longer, perform better and generally dance on its grave for half the money he paid for it BEFORE he paid for it. And that I would put it together and tweak it for free. But noooo, he was havin none of that. Plus the actual "good" cards are far, far beyond where gaming tech is at the minute anyway which is pushing the 3rd party "budget" cards down ever further in price. You can even link twin SLI cards with Nvidia or Radeon chipsets for less than £200 these days, as long as you get the cards that don't say "Radeon" or "Nvidia" on the box. MSI do some seriously powerful Graphics cards for less than £100, and some moderately (powerful enough to run modded Oblivion, but maybe not on top settings) ones for around the £50 - £60 mark that are all built on Nvidia chipsets. I do apologise. I'm rambling again, onwards and upwards. Don't take my word for it, do give Oldblivion a try (I've been wrong before. Let me know how it runs, pls) but if you want to experience Oblivion in all its glory, and especially if you want to mod it, you're gonna need something with significantly more "oomph", I'm afraid. Sorry matey. Best of luck with OIdblivion. Jenrai

Oh yeah, free advice for the future; Don't install a bunch of mods at once. Ever. Install 1 or 2 (if they are small mods - 1 if its a major overhaul) and then playtest it. That'll help you track down the causes of problems like this easier in future. As you've no doubt already realized, just deactivating mods usually doesn't completely remove them from your game. Only uninstalling them, removing the plug in files, and any data files they add, does, unless they are installed through OMOD or BAIN. And by the way - make sure you're running the latest version, 1.20416, of the game. Almost all new mods need it,m and most older ones do too. Jenrai

Thats... unusual... do you have any mods that are supposed to add a first person map? Or an in-game inventory screen? Its not so much a glitch as something deliberately trying to add another window, by the look of things. Looking at your UI, I would guess you don't have any of the UI mods (Darn, Dark UI, BTmod, that kinda thing installed) but have you made any custom changes to your .ini? If you have, make a note of them, and then rename your old .ini in the my documents -> my games -> Oblivion folder. Not the one in the default Oblivion directory or I'll send the winged monkeys around your place to kidnap your family. ;) This'll force Oblivion to rebuild your .ini, which will reset your user interface and any default settings. It may not fix this, but reason I suggest it is because its simple and fixes all sorts of things that it really shouldn't, and changing your settings back to how you want them shouldn't take 2 mins. I know most of the mods you're running, though not all, and I don't see any glaring problems unless you're missing a requirement thats escaping my attention. Try installing OBSE if you haven't already. Its not a mod and doesn't install like one, so make sure you read the read me. Let us know if any of that helps. *edit* 1 issue with your load order (though its real unlikely to cause this) - If you're running the full beauty pack, I don't think you need the hairs & eyes .esp. As far as I know thats included, and is only for people who don't want to install the Mystic Elves race. Good Luck. Jenrai

lol. I'm not laughing at you mate. More like with you. I know that sounds cliche, but you know what? I used to save esps I'd tweaked/changed more to my liking under different names, in case I broke anything with my little tweaks... and refused to use BOSS because it didn't recognise these mods for quite a while until I actually read up on it. Funny ole world ain't it. ;) Glad you got that issue sorted... unconventional solution but hey, if it works, it works. :) The only thing I can figure would have caused it and been fixed by a reinstall whilst keeping the same data folder is maybe a dodgy archive invalidation entry as thats ourside your data folder, a slightly twisted mods folder or a glitch in the initial install that escaped attention until now... or something like that... I've no idea if I'm honest. I just know it shouldn't have worked, but hey, with how my game's built it probably shouldn't even start! What can we say... the TES games and construction set work in mysterious ways! Jenrai

You've either got the patch (do you have the Game of the Year edition? If so and you've installed Shivering Isles from it you're up to date. Please note, installing non-GotY Shivering Isles doesn't update your install), downloaded the wrong patch (Did you make sure its the same language as your disk? Did you get the SI version of the patch? The regular Oblivion Patch won't patch an SI install), your install (usually the .exe but other dramatic alterations such as directly editing the default BSAs can cause this) is corrupt or too heavilly modded OR if you're using a D2D or Steam version of the game you need to get yopur patches from them. Oh, and if its pirated you're pretty much shafted. The patch checks for the copyright protection that pirated copies of the game do not have. = Borked patch. Still maintain that the best way of crimefighting game piracy is to deliberately release updates that break pirated versions of the game. Maybe thats just me though. :D Hope you get it sorted. Jenrai