What's the deal with this?

I'm in an oblivion gate and all of a sudden all the corpse mashers and their ascension calls don't work at all.

Is this a common problem?

That sounds like the animation bug, or "A-Bomb". If you're on PC, there are a number of fixes. If you're on a 360 or PS3, you'll have to start over.

Bethesda knows about the problem, but it will never be fixed in an official patch.

You can read about it here: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/813915-slowfrozen-doors-fire-spell-etc-animations-thread-8-of-jittering-doorseffectsobjects/page__p__11828804__fromsearch__1&#entry11828804

I bet Katrina is right, but jussst in case. . .

You know that it is fairly common to encounter these things broken, right? If so, when you click to activate, you will get a notice saying something like '...too badly damaged to function' or such. You probably already know this and have ruled that out as a possibility, but just thought I would mention it. I've been bitten by smaller things.

This one and another were previously "working", furthermore, if I fall down the corpse masher shaft, and activate it manually, it goes up, and then does nothing else.

I've tried OAF and I'm trying different pre-set bytes and nothing's working... rar.

I hate to say it, but between fallout and oblivion, they really dropped the ball on how buggy and unplayable these games can be.

Ugh, the offending byte associated with the A-bomb bug is not present here.

This is really annoying.

You can activate them two ways:

(at least on 360)
1. Hit the switch.
2. Get on top of it, and activate it. You have to be careful when standing on it, because if you are low level and touch a spike, it will take half your health off. I sneak, rather than walk on it.

Did you try that?

edit: guess I didnt read well enough. Reload a save?

Yeah, I do have a save that is relatively close to my current position, however I've read that if you progress in the same manner, the bug will likely recur.

However, interestingly enough, after turning off clipping and leaving that particular oblivion gate, I checked random doors and traps elsewhere around cyrodiil, and lo and behold, they work!

So... maybe corpse mashers in that particular oblivion realm (earthquake) are affected, perhaps it's ALL corpse mashers, but nothing else seems to have been, so that's good I guess?

Whatever works to keep you going... glad you worked it out.