SiajEnab

I had already tried both of your suggestions and I had even went and made the ini files read-only after adjusting them and the problem still persisted. So I uninstalled it from steam (again) deleted all the game content I could find (including the save folder in my games) and scrubbed the registry clean while rebooting after every step. I then defragged my hdd (not because I thought it would help with the problem, my drive just really needed it) rebooted once more and installed. Safe to say the game works flawlessly now. Thanks for your help everyone.

Actually, I had steam installed on my E: drive and I disabled UAC as soon as I first installed win7. Nevertheless, I tried moving my steam and oblivion install as you suggested and the problem still persists. I also tried setting oblivion.exe and oblivionlauncher.exe to run as administrators and still no dice. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

It's been a while since the last time I played oblivion. So long that I have a new computer, new car, new house even. But, I got that itch and so I decided to reinstall it and catch up on the latest mods. When I tried to boot up the game after a fresh install I got to the launcher screen an it told me "Oblivion will now detect your video hardware and set video options accordingly. Video settings have been set for Very Low Quality." I found that strange, went into the options tab and tried to adjust my settings to my liking. First I set the resolution to 1920x1080 to match my monitor (well, my monitor is actually 1920x1200, but close enough), then when I tried to turn off vsync I noticed that the resolution had reverted back to 640x480. I fiddled around some more and every change I made would immediately revert back to the defaults. At that point I decided to ignore the launcher config, boot up the game and see if I could fix things from in there. So I went into the video options, selected 1920x1080, and restarted oblivion as prompted. This brought me back to the launcher screen which once more gave me the "Oblivion will now detect your video hardware and set video options accordingly. Video settings have been set for Very Low Quality." message. After testing once more to see if I could make any changes to the default settings (I couldn't) I booted up the game and enjoyed the beautiful 640x480 resolution. After that I tried numerous other fixes. I updated my drivers, I fiddled with the graphics settings in oblivion_default.ini, I reinstalled oblivion, and then I went searching through the steam and bethesda faqs and forums. After much effort and no luck I decided to make a post about my struggles here in the hope that someone would be able to help. If not, well, I guess I'm forced into playing oblivion at all the default graphical settings for all eternity. A cruel fate indeed. Below I've detailed my computer's setup. Windows 7 x64 Intel Core i7 920 ATI HD5700 6GB DDR3 1066 MSI X-58 Jai Bradley