Striker879

Check through the mod requirements of your mods ... if they say they need Oblivion Script Extender (OBSE) then they need it.

Or for a new character (who doesn't have any gold to speak of) Maple Cottage, also by Emma (notice a theme here).

Get your game installed outside of UAC's clutches. If you need help re-installing follow Bben46's Oblivion reinstall procedure. If you use the Steam version of the game don't miss the link near the top of the page about moving your Steam installation, and don't neglect the part about cleaning your registry ... it's important too.

One caveat I can offer on running your laptop plugged in for long periods of time is remove your battery while doing this once it is fully charged. Lithium ion batteries have a lifespan that is limited to start with (that starts when it is manufactured and will diminish it's available capacity over the lifetime of the battery). Leaving a fully charged battery plugged in will accelerate the rate of loss. I used my laptop as my primary machine for a while, so I learned from experience (prior to studying up on batteries, and their vagaries). Wikipedia offers more than you ever wanted to know about heap. I would call it an area of your computer's memory that is allocated to store some particular data. If that data gets corrupted in any way then all operations that depend on it will fail. In the case of the OSR note, if you periodically replaced the heap data with fresh values you'd avoid that data corruption problem (or perhaps the OSR note is referring to data fragmentation in the heap ... one sure way to get a response from those who really are knowledgeable is put out some inaccurate information ... that bait will catch 'em every time).

I did a Google on your notebooks video card. Third from the top, right after NVIDIA official specs page is this forum link. Not sure if any of the issues discussed strike a bell with you or not, but something mentioned at the bottom of the second page (post #40 by sile119) leads me to my suggestion. Try turning your laptop settings to 'high performance' and see if you can run textures set to Large (naturally you'll either sacrifice battery life or need to run plugged in).

Defragmenting a hard drive is done with either the defragging utility that comes bundled with Windows (found in All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter from the Start button in Windows Vista) or with a third party defragging utility. Either will make sure that the files on your hard disk occupy a contiguous area on your drive (in other words aren't broken into pieces and spread over whatever available spots there were on your drive when you installed the DLC). Now that said, after reading your report of no problems without the UOPs then I tend towards an installation issue with the UOPs. Do a manual download of them and extract the archives with 7-Zip. Read the install instructions and do a manual install.

DragonAviator talks about BSA fragmentation all the time on the Claudia's Little Secret thread. The DLCBattlehornCastle.bsa isn't huge by any means, but maybe it's fragmented right at that record and the game's having trouble reading it.

I couldn't resist checking this out myself (and besides, it's keeping me from going outside and shoveling snow). I have an older Logitech USB keyboard that was just kicking around in the spare parts bin so I plugged it into my HP laptop (non-gaming and running Vista) and then booted up. Logged into my non-administrator account using the external keyboard and created a text file in Notepad. Actually you can use both keyboards at the same time. The keyboard doesn't show in your 'connected usb devices' (like a USB stick would) so you don't need to 'eject' it before unplugging. I also tried booting without the external keyboard connected and then plugged it in ... still worked the same (i.e. both keyboards could be used) and unplugging left the laptop keyboard functioning fine. Having two keyboards makes it not very possible to play with your laptop on your lap, but if your's is anything like mine that's not really something I'd be doing anyway. You should be able to pick up a cheap keyboard, or maybe even a small one that will fit into your laptop bag.

Ouch ... if I either run across where I got that info or a solution to your problem I'll post. - Edit - If you can borrow a keyboard to try this it will be a zero cost experiment ... keyboards are USB devices, and on a desktop are recognized at boot-up as such. What would happen if you plugged in a keyboard and then booted your laptop?

The best advice you could ever follow is "Only install one mod at a time, and test thoroughly between adding mods". If a mod breaks the game it's simple to figure out which mod did it. To resolve your current situation you may be best to do a complete re-install. That way, if you do a thorough and proper job of uninstalling and re-installing, you'll be getting started without any 'leftovers' from your past coming back to haunt you. I suggest Bben46's Oblivion reinstall procedure as a guide to follow. Don't miss the link near the top of that page about moving your Steam folder if you use the Steam version of the game, and don't skip the registry cleaning step either ... it's important.

I could be mistaken on this, but I seem to recall that the menu level of keys is hard coded into the game. You may be on the market for a new keyboard.

If you already have a bunch of empty grand soul gems it's just a matter of timing. I find the most convenient altar is the one at ... when you're headed towards Anvil you'll see the if it's the right day as you cross the bridge just past Fyrelight Cave. When I find they're 'on sale' I load up. I believe you weren't on the mark about what souls the black soul gems can trap nosisab. Here's a quote from the Notes section of the UESP Wiki on Black Soul Gems: I always keep a supply of grand soul gems in reserve, along with the smaller sizes. Souls will always go to the smallest available gem that they'll fit into, and I like to have a variety of sizes of filled gems so that I don't waste much when recharging my weapons.

Outside of drive letter the only difference between my shortcut's path and yours is mine has the quote marks (I've highlighted in red here) ... "G:\Oblivion\obse_loader.exe" -editor. I'm using the disk version of the game, if you're using the Steam version it may work differently (OBSE for Steam loads differently than the disk version OBSE).

Fast travel will always take you to the map marker for that place. In the case of Vilvern the UESP Wiki shows the map marker as 60ft west of the entrance (marked as M on this map). Take note of the map marker name in the wiki article (VilverinMapMarker01). You can search for any vanilla location and find the same info. I stopped using fast travel a long time ago, in part because of crashes, and in part because of having my most recently ridden horse show up (I find having a horse, which bandits prefer to attack over the player, is an extra complication when traveling ... ride along, spot a bandit, turn around and ride a safe distance away and dismount, go and kill the bandit, return to find out where the horse has wandered off to). Granted, on my old guy's saves I travel with a horse, but that's because Vilja loves her horse Bruse, and worries that she doesn't spend enough time with him. While she gets her beauty sleep each night my guy 'plows the way' towards the next day's destination. I can cover twice the ground on foot because I don't have to continually go back and get the horse. My new guy travels on foot because I want to train up athletics and acrobatics. If you travel by horse you don't get the training ... I'm not sure whether or not you do if you fast travel (but not on horseback).

Do you get the crash at Vilvern if you go there the old fashioned way (i.e. without fast traveling)?

When I first suggested the BBB DeadlyReflex6UnnecessaryViolenceII CompatibilitySkeleton I should have looked at your load order first. You're going to need some skeleton that is compatible with UVII and Vipcxjs Real High Heels System (and I don't know if such an animal exists).

Use the BBB DeadlyReflex6UnnecessaryViolenceII CompatibilitySkeleton.

Just put Ringwraiths in the description field on the TESNexus Advanced Search page and hit submit. It will likely be one of the seven mods that come up.

You could try 'coc center' and then wait for 72 hours plus a bit. Then 'coc weye' (or any other spot, but not one of the ones you're having trouble with). Then see if your problem is resolved.

When my SLI rig died and I downgraded to the 9800 GT I had that black sky thing happen. For me it turned out that the game had not detected the video card correctly and applied the wrong shader (can't remember for sure ... may have been shaderpackage015.sdp). When I forced the correct shader (13 in my case) the sky went back to normal. Is there anyone reading who has a GTX 260 and can report what shader package they are using?

What you are seeing is likely related to a well known peculiarity of how the game calculates feather. Here's a UESP Wiki atricle on Encumbrance. Follow the Feather link on that page for more details.

Here's a quote from the file CM Partners Creating Custom Partners.doc (that was included in the CM Partners Basic download): The process is call mod de-isolation.

The problem in getting black soul gems for a low level player (who also knows how to make them ... i.e. has played through the mages guild before) is Once you have those two items it's just a matter of waiting for the proper day and going to the proper place(s).

Those lists weren't bad ... I was expecting a DXDiag sized list. I agree with your assessment that temperatures aren't the issue, and I also think that sound has been eliminated as well. Don't worry, your not alone in the 'grasping at straws' stage. I'm going to suggest that we force shader model 3.0 (your card should support it no problem). Here's a quote from Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide: The file RendererInfo.txt is in the same folder as your Oblivion.ini: Renderer Device Information: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT nv4_disp.dll RenderPath : BSSM_SV_2_A PSversion : 300 VSversion : 300 VStarget : vs_2_0 PStarget : ps_2_a PS2xtarget : ps_2_a maxPS20inst : 512 3.0 Shaders : yes Image space effects : yes Nonpowerof2textures : yes FP16ARGB blending : yes FP16ARGB filtering : yes High dynamic range : yes Bloom lighting : no Refraction : yes 2.0 hair : yes SLI mode : no Water shader : yes Water reflections : yes Water displacement : yes Water high res : yes Multisample Type : 0 Shader Package : 13 I'm not sure how much other direct comparison you could make between my file and yours ... we're both NVIDIA but after my SLI rig died I've had to limp along on the GeForce 9800 GT I had kicking around spare. Providing your RendererInfo.txt says you're good to go with SM 3.0 it's a matter of renaming two files ... like Koroush's example my case involved renaming my original shaderpackage013.sdp and then renaming a copy of my original shaderpackage019.sdp to shaderpackage013.sdp (to be on the safe side it wouldn't hurt to backup your entire Oblivion\Data\Shaders folder to a location outside of your Oblivion folder). The other thing you could check is the line: bFullBrightLighting=0 also in the Graphics section of Oblivion.ini. If it is set to 1 it could be causing grief (it's meant for machines that are marginal for playing the game ... that's not your machine).

Here's a link to a NifTools page: NifSkope/Change texture. The most common error is starting the texture path with C:\Programs Files ... (or whatever drive letter the mod author had Oblivion installed in). Texture paths all need to start with textures\clothes or textures\armor (e.g. textures\armor\JoesUberCoolArmor\cuirass.dds, but a quick look at the mod comments, the age of the mod and the fact that the mod author (who said it was very easy to fix the texture paths, yet couldn't be bothered to do so himself) hasn't had anything to do with it since Oct 2006 leads me to ask ... why bother?