Oblivion crash on launch solved! ...sort of...

[thrillseeker3242]

So I've been having this problem of not being able to start Oblivion AT ALL, even with no mods active (just Oblivion.esm). It usually happens somewhere in the process of impatiently installing the full Better Cities and Unique Landscapes, after I already have FCOM running...

 

It would crash before even showing the initial loading screen... I click on launch, and the next thing that happens is I see a message "Oblivion has stopped working. Vista will notify you if a solution blah blah blah..." Doesn't matter whether I use OBSE loader, Oblivion Launcher, or Oblivion.exe.

 

So I made a backup installation of Oblivion, and then started deleting things one by one until the old install folder looked just like the fresh copy. When I completely replaced the Data folder with the fresh one, it would work. Guess I should have tried something like that sooner... So then I restored the 10 GB of files I had sent to my recycle bin... And it still works. So it would seem that the problem was something missing from the Data folder that needed to be there. Sounds like a no-brainer, but the key detail is that it worked after restoring...I said "copy and replace" to all while restoring, so therefore it wasn't (a) file(s) that was changed that was causing the problem, or the presence of something that shouldn't be there, or something that was there that needed something that wasn't (like an esp that relied on an esm that was no longer there)...it must have been, unless I'm mistaken, something from Vanilla Oblivion that was somehow deleted, probably in the process of moveing/deleting/uninstalling mods with Wrye Bash and/or OBMM and/or manually in order to resolve mod conflicts that arose from installing massive packages like Better Cities and Unique Landscapes and patch compiliations for BC and UL, which contained esps that depended on files I didn't have. I should have moved the copied fresh-install Data folder before restoring the old one so I could have figured out exactly what it was that was missing.

[TodaY]

It's probably Fcom. It runs when it's inactive too, like all of your mods. Do you use wyre bash/obmm? Did you update oblivion to the last version?

You could also try to remove your mods completely from your data folder. That might help

[bben46]

Here is an easier way to do that.

Here is my revert to vanilla article - how to go back to the original state without reinstalling.

http://www.tesnexus.com/articles/article.php?id=340