Striker879

So it's any light that flickers then. In your Oblivion.ini what is your value for 'fFlickerMovement=8.0000'? As far as I know mine is at the default value. You may want to play around with different settings for shadow filtering and try turning down your Interior Shadows and/or Exterior Shadows to lessen the load. As a quick check to see if shadows are the culprit you could use the console command 'tsh' (ToggleCastShadows) to turn off shadows and see what differences there are.

Always keep backups of your WIP mod. They'll provide a safety net for hardware failure if you keep them on a separate physical hard drive (or flash drive) plus if you do so regularly they'll give you an opportunity to take a couple of steps back if you find yourself with a broken mod due to some glitch or error while working on your mod. I've been using MOM for a couple of weeks now. It makes keeping two or more characters, each with individual mod lists, an absolute breeze. You could work on your mod in a vanilla Oblivion environment and then test on any flavour of modded Oblivion you want. Wouldn't play without it again.

You need to take note of the direction he points when he stops walking ... that's the direction to the Mouth of the Panther. Once you find the right spot have a nice fight ... I know I did first time (if you can call cussing about every two seconds a 'nice fight' ... hehe).

Try moving DR6 to after your bashed patch (I think I saw something about that on the Deadly Reflex thread a while back ... or you could ask on that thread about doing that first, Omeletted is pretty regular at checking the thread and knows DR6 inside out and backwards)

If you see version 1.2.0416 displayed in the lower left corner of your screen when you first start the game then you have the latest official patch installed. The unofficial patches aren't required to play the game, but they do fix many of the problems found in the vanilla game even after it's patched to version 1.2.0416. You see that noted in many of the UESP links I've posted (and it's not just quest problems that are fixed ... level anomalies for things like quest rewards, sigil stones and NPC AI schedules, among others). On my first full playthrough of the main quest as well as all the miscellaneous and guild quests I didn't install the unofficial patches as one of the anomalies the UOP fixed was the permanent bound armor glitch, and I was seriously addicted to permanent bound armor with that character.

May not be it, but when you mentioned torches etc. it made me think of the A-bomb problem. Wrye Bash has a fix for it, or you can use Animation Fixer. Either will give you a report of whether or not your game is at the fixing stage (Animation Fixer reports the staus of the problem byte in the box 'Byte Found', anything 48 and up I run the fix ... Wyre reports a percentage I believe). When I first ran into the A-bomb I was getting what seemed random slow downs (the slow downs were actually whenever the sticking animations were trying to play).

The UAC issue will affect you whether or not you use a disk copy, so if you ever intend to install mods you'll be well served by a re-installation to a folder outside of C:\Program Files (the usual suggestion is create a folder C:\Games and then install to that directory, giving you C:\Games\Oblivion or C:\Games\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion). Setup taking an hour to start isn't the sign of a normal install. If your disk is clean and free of scratches and still takes a long time to access I would cancel out of the install once it finally starts and then try to access the disk with Windows Explorer. If Explorer takes a long time to show the disk contents I would tend to think you either have a problem with your drive (is it a Blu-ray or DVD drive) or if the drive works fine with other store bought disks then maybe you have a bad Oblivion game disk.

Here's another of my Striker quote-a-thons from the UESP Wiki (this time it's The Forlorn Watchman (also as usual, emphasis added):

Just for my own information, have you recently downloaded the game from Steam or is this an older download (I'm a non-Steam kinda' guy myself, but I thought that it kept the game updated all the time when your machine phones home to the mothership). You can PM me if it's something you'd rather not discuss on the open forum.

If you have installed Oblivion in the default location C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86) you aren't starting out on the right foot. I'm not suggesting that that is your current problem, but the Microsoft security feature UAC doesn't play nice with Oblivion once you start to install mods. I'm an old WinXP dinosaur myself, but one of the moderators here is always quick to point out that he doesn't need any compatibility modes to run Oblivion on Windows 7. Should you decide to make a fresh start here's a link to Bben46's Oblivion reinstall procedure. If you use the Steam version of the game don't miss the link near the top on moving your Steam folder, and don't neglect the registry cleaning step either, or old registry entries may come back to haunt you.

That sounds like the amulet slot (which is a slot that some armors use). Is your character wearing something in the amulet slot already, perhaps that can't be automatically removed (normally when you equip something in an occupied slot it just unequips the old piece and equips the new one)?

Make sure you're using the latest drivers for your onboard sound, and if you've installed any 'codec paks' you may want to uninstall them while you're troubleshooting to see if they are to blame. Sometimes codecs come with music or movie players, so you may have some installed you didn't realize. Can't be much help on those mods ... I'm a pretty vanilla old guy (outside of BBB and some homegrown mods of mine).

That sounds like something I've posted in the past. A while back we had a rash of archive invalidation issues with Steam users. More recently I haven't heard those complaints, and in fact a couple of times that I've asked about dates on the Steam version vanilla bsa files just recently they were OK. As much as I'm not a Steam lover, I would have been surprised if they didn't correct their problem once they became aware of it. To verify that your bsa file dates are OK you can check them using Windows Explorer. You will need to at least temporarily turn on the option to show file details (check the menus at the top of the Windows Explorer window). If your vanilla bsa files (e.g. Oblivion - Meshes.bsa found in the Oblivion\Data folder) show a date in 2006 you're OK. Archive invalidation is a method used to get the game to use newer resources instead of the resources it has packed in the vanilla bsa files (e.g. skeleton.nif in this case). The preferred method today is called BSA Redirection. The easiest way to implement that is by using Oblivion Mod Manager (OBMM). From the Utilities button on the right side of the window select Archive Invalidation and then the radio button for BSA Redirection (without changing any of the other default options). Click 'Update Now', close the archive invalidation dialogue and then close OBMM (it doesn't actually make any changes until you close it). It's a do once and forget it solution.

You can left click and hold on the top border (e.g. where it says Object Window) and then drag the window to a location you like. Once you get the windows separated (say each to it's own corner) if you hover the mouse over one of the window edges you'll see the cursor change to a sideways bracket looking shape. Click, hold and drag that window margin to widen or lengthen the window. If you hover the mouse cursor over a corner it will turn into an angled grab tool that will let you drag the corner (which is actually the easiest way to resize). When you next close the CS it will remember the window positions and sizes.

When the AI system gets overloaded the affected NPCs won't do anything except stand there. If you know which mods you have loaded that add a bunch of extra NPCs you could perhaps lower that number (if the mod has a way of doing that, perhaps an ini file setting). I've had a look through Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide with an eye for something that may help. In the Advanced Tweaking section there is mention of some multithreading tweaks you could try to see if they help: There's not really anything that is directed at your problem specifically in Koroush's guide. The game was designed before most of today's hardware features were available, so most of modern hardware's advanced features can't been taken advantage of.

Completing quests doesn't do anything towards advancing your level. Some quests will give a point of fame or infamy (closing Oblivion Gates will also give you a point of fame). Having a certain amount of fame is a requirement for certain quests (some of the Daedric Shrine quests for example), and your fame + infamy total goes towards which Heaven Stones are available for you to use. Advancing your character's level is a subject with many nuances and more than one 'correct' way of doing in the vanilla game. Major skills advance faster per use than minor skills. If you have major skills that you use a lot your character will level-up frequently. The monsters and badguys also level along with you. If the skills you have been advancing aren't ones useful for fighting the new monsters you can find yourself at a disadvantage for a while until your needed skills catch up. I personally tend to prefer to have major skills I don't use frequently so that my character tends to level more slowly. I have the skills planned in such a way I don't have to 'train' a skill just before leveling just so that I can max out my 5 point bonuses in the areas I want them at the time (until strength, endurance and intelligence/willpower are maxed at 100 that's where I focus). Here's a UESP Wiki article on Leveling.

I'm not sure what comes with the 5th Anniversary Edition. My original Game of the Year edition has Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles, but none of the other add-ons. I was lucky and found a Knights of the Nine disk at Staples that included all the other DLCs, but that was a long time ago. I'm not sure what would be available today.

I've had it happen repeatedly like that before even in non-quest related wilderness areas I wanted to pass through along the road. In the past I've just found a different route to my destination that skirted the trouble cell. Go back to that cell after a few days game time and all is well. Works equally as well if it's a particular spot in a dungeon or similar. I always try that before resorting to an previous save if I'm not crazy about losing all my progress.

Sometimes something in a particular spot gets the game's undies in a bunch. You could try the console 'coc center' and then wait for 72 hours plus a bit trick. Then coc back to Anvil or Kvatch (somewhere close by to the Brina Cross Inn but not in the same cell) and see if that has helped.

If I recall correctly there was a similar issue recently that turned out to be caused by audio codecs. Your specs say laptop to me (however I have been wrong in assumptions before), but in any case are you using the onboard sound? - Edit - Here's a couple of links to the recent threads I recalled: Oblivion lags in combat and Crash after full loading before the main menu

Remind me ... are you a Steam version or a disk version kinda' guy?

Can't say for sure on the Skyrim UAC issue ... I don't have the machine to run Skyrim, wouldn't buy it as it's a Steam required title and haven't been impressed by many aspects of the game I see reported (although that is the lesser of any of the reasons). I bought Sims 3 for my granddaughter for Christmas. It's a recent enough game it should have been designed to coexist with UAC. She's old enough to install her own stuff, but I still walked her through creating a new directory C:\Games on her laptop (Windows 7 64 bit) and made sure she was good to go for changing the install directory to it. Sims 3 can be modded, and if there's one thing I've learned here it's modding and UAC don't make good bedfellows. Once you've created the C:\Games folder it's a trivial matter to change the install directory for any game. My own desktops have always had separate hard drives dedicated to games (that was actually my first hardware upgrade, way back in the original Pentium CPU days ... got me started building my own machines).

Mehrunes' Razor is a weapon available through one of the official plug-ins.

Anything you attack by physical means (swords, blunts or bows) will gain you experience in their respective skill. It takes physical hits on you to advance light or heavy armor (depending on what your character is wearing at the time) and successful blocks of hits to advance blocking. Some of the creatures you'll face in Oblivion use magic attacks (e.g scamps and stunted scamps) so fighting them won't advance your armor or blocking skills until they switch to physical attacks. When you use magical attacks it will advance your destruction skill and of course healing yourself advances restoration (if you visit Oblivion very often you'll gain lots of restoration experience). If you use alchemy, making healing and feather potions for yourself will advance that skill (feather to carry all the loot, healing potions for when you run short of health and magicka ... always seems to happen at the same time when you're in Oblivion). I like to close a few gates early in the game for the sigil stones. They offer a handy way to make your own enchanted gear (I am addicted to my rings of strength and amulets of feather, without a doubt). The sigil stones are randomly determined at the moment you grab the stone. I save right before I grab the stone so that if I don't get something I find useful I can reload the save and try again.

Another of my UESP Wiki quotes, this time from the page on Soul Gems