Game freezes when I start a new game

[Striker879]

Here's some tips excerpted from Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide:

From the Audio section, emphasis added.

If you are experiencing audio-related glitches or problems, firstly make sure you have installed the latest audio drivers for your sound card. Details of these are in the Driver Installation/Windows Drivers chapter of the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion, along with further instructions in that chapter for correct driver installation and general driver tips. Disable all additional audio effects or enhancements. For example, if you run a Creative sound card, go into the Audio HQ/Audio Console and in the EAX Control Panel click the 'All Effects Off' option or select 'No Effects' for all the presets. You should also consider disabling CMSS 3D, and indeed any other audio effect options which may be conflicting with Oblivion's sound. You should also consider uninstalling any 'codec packs' you may have installed, as these are known to cause audio problems in a range of games. Contrary to popular belief, most sound cards and even recent onboard audio solutions do not have a conflict with Oblivion, so typically the problem is with the audio settings and/or other audio codecs installed on the system.

Some validation on why your solution has worked.

If you are still having lots of stuttering, audio glitches and crashes, you can undertake certain tweaks to disable Sound Hardware Acceleration or disable the background music in Oblivion - see the bDSoundHWAcceleration and bMusicEnabled variables in particular under the Advanced Tweaking section. The reason for this is that the background music is dynamic, and responds to your location and situation. While it is indeed very beautiful music, it is constantly loading in the background, changing whenever combat is initiated for example, so it can use up additional RAM and accesses hard drive resources adding to stuttering on many systems.

 

I did a Google search on your ADIHdAud.sys and saw some references to it being used as a malware vector. You might consider using an on-line scanner (or two) to check your ADI files to eliminate that possibility. I didn't see any driver direct download links near the top of the search ... you may want to check out your motherboard manufacturer's site (for on-board sound) or sound card manufacturer's site (for discrete sound card) to download their latest driver (in case the driver is out of date or the one Windows Update has installed is not working 100% ... I've run into that on more than one occasion with sound, network and USB drivers).

 

Google Maps 'Sarnia' and I'll go out in the backyard and wave. :laugh: