All the animations in Oblivion recently started to slow dramatically. NPC's, my character (and his torch), magic bolts, weapons, all work speedily, but all other animations like opening doors, gates, traps, bush buttons, cages, etc are very, VERY, slow. Mists, smoke, magic spell side effects, all hang nearly indefinitely in the air. Campfires animate choppily. My character is around level 30 or so, and until now, the game has never behaved this way.

Thinking I might have reached some limit on game saves, I moved about 600 of the 700 of them to another directory with no change.

I haven't installed any new programs or made any hardware changes. I checked WIndows Task Manager and found the computer to be operating with no programs taking abnormal amounts of memory or CPU time. I restarted the computer just in case something got stuck in memory. I'm running Oblivion in Windows 7 on an AMD64 3.2 ghz Quad Core computer with 8gb memory and 2 nVidia GeForce 9500 GT cards in SLI configuration.

Do any of you have any idea what I'm dealing with here?

OK... nevermind! I managed to overlook the solution to this issue in one of this forum's stickies. For those interested, the issue is addressed here:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/813915-slowfrozen-doors-fire-spell-etc-animations-thread-8-of-jittering-doorseffectsobjects/?p=11828804&fromsearch=1#entry11828804