Updated video card driver causing CTD

[Essell]

Well, here I am to post my results, yes, a day later than promised. The process took longer than expected. Ah, well. I am happy to report, however, that I once again have access to Tamriel. Huzzah, or Hutzpah, or somesuch! So, I'll try to keep this both as brief and as detailed as possible. In a nutshell, I combined all the advice given. I began by doing a thorough uninstall/restart of all old drivers. I then performed a complete disk clean and defragmentation (this ate up several hours right there). Next, I reinstalled the new drivers, making sure to turn off all anti-virus software beforehand, and restarted. Oblivion still did the CTD. "Mild" frustration. But then I remembered billypnats' comment about Oblivion recognizing the drivers as new hardware, and altering the oblivion.ini file to compensate. So I thought to myself, "Hey self, instead of trying to force new drivers on Oblivion, or deleting the .ini file, why not take the reverse approach and allow the new drivers to recognize Oblivion?" Long story short, I did a complete uninstall of everything Oblivion: original Oblivion, Shivering Isles, Downloadable Content, mods, patches, obmm, the whole nine yards (what exactly does that mean, anyway? Nine yards of what? Why only nine? hmm...). Perhaps this seems excessive, but I do like to be thorough. I then reinstalled each program in an orderly fashion, downloading update patches as necessary, installing all extra content neatly into obmm. Well, guess what? It worked! It seems that Oblivion wanted to be brought up within the context of the new drivers' environment, rather than trying to adapt itself to a new situation. What a baby! So, for anyone else encountering this problem, rather than deleting a file you may wish to use later (oblivion.ini), try this approach (i.e. after installing new drivers, uninstall/restart/reinstall all Oblivion files). You may only need to reinstall the base program, rather than all files as I have done, though it never hurts to be sure.

 

So thanks so very much to all those who took the time to offer their advice. Varus Torvyn, Gaugain, myrmaad, and billypnats. Cheers!

[Varus Torvyn]

You're welcome.

 

Whenever I install a new driver, I just click on Oblivion_Launcher, and when the screen comes up, it does the video card detection (just as it does the very first time you run it after you first bought the game).

 

Since I'm now using OBSE, I either start the game with an icon pointing to obse_loader.exe or I use Wrye Bash to start the game.

 

I haven't had problems running the game after a new driver install.