I remember how the game would allow all sorts of NPCs to die from bad scripting accidents (like stepping off the Skingrad Castle bridge to their death). Maybe that's what has become of Falanu Hlaalu? All Things Alchemical is always locked up; I've broken in to look for the owner, but she's not anywhere inside. I'm not finding any mention of her taking trips in the unofficial wiki.

If game bugs have killed her off, how do I get her back into the game and opening the shop?

[update] OK, I read the notes at the bottom of her wiki page and discovered that she spends the morning at the chapel, thanks to a bug fix in the Unofficial Oblivion Patch. I found her there. Just means her store hours aren't quite 8-8 like everyone else.

I've never had that problem. But on the PC you can enter the console command

player.moveto 28E74

and you should teleport to her location.

If she is dead you can click on the body (while in console mode) and enter the command "resurrect"

If she is stuck somewhere you can click on her and toggle clipping with the "tcl" command, and then enter "tcl" again when she is free.

(to open or close the console use the tilde key "~")

Her store hours for me, are between about 1030 am and 6 pm.

Wonder what she's doing in those hours at the Chapel... I hope you didn't find her near the graveyard

She actually does go near the Graveyard. One of the priests mentions seeing her there with a 'strange look' on her face.

Typical Falanu

maybe she packed her bags and went back to morrowind.....or skyrim......*thinking*

you mentioned people falling off the bridge ( sorry for extra post) , if you have high enough acrobatics you can jump from their into skingrad i think? i can just imagine falanu jumping off the bridge with a cross on her neck or something...seems the sort of thing she would do!
seriousley i STILL dont quite get what the whole business is about, ( i mean her famous question) , i get it but then im like, uh....what?

anybody comeing to rescue me on that one?

also i realised today ive had ob for three years! i never knew i had had it so long!

or the undercroft...

I've had Oblivion since 2006. The day I bought it, I also bought a new $350 AGP card to play it with. And we all know how well Oblivion ran back in 2006....

I gave up in disgust after a couple months. Aside from the performance, it was so riddled with bugs that I couldn't stand wasting time trying to enjoy it.

My wife got a laptop a couple years back, and the kids and I started playing Oblivion on that. It was a $650 laptop, but it ran circles around the $2000 gaming rig I built back in '04. Anyway, I got tired of fighting with the kids over the laptop (and my poor wife almost never got to use it), so I quit again.

Last month, I built myself a new i7 rig with a GTX580 and 12Gb of RAM. I have returned to Oblivion. Everything's maxed out. It stutters a little some times, but I figure that's because it's such a lousy port. Still, I'm in hog heaven.

So I've had Oblivion for five years, and am only now getting to play it AND enjoy it.

And Skyrim is next. Oh, yeah....

Hey, that is my computer! Seriously, I have the exact same rig. I also have the same stutter problem, even using OSR. Like you, I chalk it up to simply being a poorly coded game. The same engine runs much better in Fallout 3.

Cheydinhal has a nice graveyard. Hint-e-di-hint-hint

You overclocked yours yet? I've still got everything at stock speeds. I know the CPU can get over 4GHz. Probably would help this game much, but will help out quite a bit over the next few years.

I've got an EVGA X58 motherboard designed for overclocking. I've not started yet, as I've much to learn about the relationships between components, voltages, and frequencies.

No, I have not bothered. So far it has all the oomph I need to run any game and look good while doing it. Oblivion is the only one that has issues, but I do not think my hardware is to blame there.