Crashing When Saving Using "New"

[Netjera]

Has anyone else experienced this? Over 100 hours of gameplay with Oblivion, and not a single crash. Suddenly, I'm doing the Mage's Guild Quest "Vahtacen's Secret" and I get a crash when trying to save. When I go to load the game, it tells me the save is corrupt. So I go back a save and it runs fine. Until the next time I try to save. Then it crashes again - during the save.

 

It's not happening to me *every* time I save, but it seems to be happening every time I save after looting a corpse - no matter how long ago it was. If I loot a corpse and save five minutes later, after fast traveling to another city, it'll crash. If I go back and save after every action, it'll crash after I loot corpses, but not after picking up stuff off the ground or opening chests.

 

Anybody got any clues? I'm going crazy because suddenly, I can't do anything.

[Netjera]

UPDATE - FIXED - INGREDIENTS ARE THE CAUSE

 

I do a lot of saving - I never use Quicksave - I always use the menu option and then Save:New - so I was really upset when this started happening. Because I save so often, (after I kill something, after I pick up something new, whenever I change locations - practically every five minutes), I was really worried that this was happening all the time. I'm hoping to save someone else that anxiety, so here's my update.

 

I literally began saving after every single action and was able to better-identify where the crashes were happening. At first, it seemed that I was crashing randomly. Then, I discovered that I was crashing whenever I looted corpses and tried to save. I could still pick up stuff off the ground and save, but looting was causing crashes. However, I was doing the above-mentioned quest, and all the enemies are UNDEAD. After progressing past it, I went to Dark Fissure where there are a combination of necromancers and undead.

 

I couldn't loot undead corpses and then save without crashing. However, I could loot chests, pick stuff up off the ground or loot HUMAN corpses without crashing. Or so I thought.

 

I continued saving after every action, and had the same type of crash after trying to harvest some mushrooms. Again, I was back to thinking that maybe the issue was random. However, I still had no trouble picking up anything off the ground, or looting chests.

 

Then, I looted a chest with some bonemeal in it. I saved, and whoops! - crash during the save again. That's when it hit me: Undead carry alchemy ingredients. I had a crash while harvesting mushrooms - another alchemy ingredient. And the chest - bonemeal: an alchemy ingredient.

 

I'm using two mods, which previously have not caused me any problems: Purse of Wonders with Kea's Alchemical Sorter, and BoneGrind. When I looked in my alchemy pouch, I had TWO SETS of bonemeal. A set of 538 bonemeal (guess I'd ground up a lot of bones without using them) and a set of 7 bonemeal. Why those 7 bonemeal were special, I have no idea.

 

My first GUESS is that the alchemy sorter has some sort of max number of ingredients - either on the number that can go in the pouch, or the number that can go in a slot - and that I went over that limit. It would explain why I had two sets of bonemeal - Once I filled up the normal slot for bonemeal, it tried to create another, maybe.

 

My second guess is that I somehow picked up some corrupted bonemeal.

 

Either way, I tested my theory by having a massive potion-making fest in the middle of Dark Fissure. Sure enough, when I was done, I could save normally. I even went back and looted corpses that I hadn't been able to loot before, gathered mushrooms that had caused crashes before, and no problems.

 

I don't know for certain EXACTLY what the issue is - but the workaround is clear - don't be a packrat, mix up potions. By changing the ingredients into potions, I bypassed either an overflow issue, or a corrupt ingredient issue.

 

Hope this helps someone.