I recently installed Oblivion on my brand new Windows 7 machine, and I'm experiencing periodic (but frequent) 1-5 second freezes. It makes the game pretty much unplayable. I did a bit of searching and discovered that this can be caused by audio codec problems, so I went into Oblivion.ini and disabled sound and music, and voila! no more freezes. Obviously, I'd vastly prefer to play the game with sound and music enabled, but so far I have been unable to figure out how to fix the game so that I can both have sound and not have constant freeze-ups. I tried downloading K-Lite and having it fix broken codecs (it did find a few), but that didn't help. I also tried disabling sound acceleration in the .ini file.

What other options do I have?

Thanks in advance.

The way I see it you have a few options to try out first before you're installing Oblivion again.

1 - Update Windows7 (install any Service Pack there is available)
2 - Check out the vendor of your computer/motherboard for any updated software you can find
3 - Also update the software of your sound card (sound card is often integrated on the motherboard these days)
4 - Don't forget to visit http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/home.html or http://www.amd.com/se/Pages/AMDHomePage.aspx (AMD homepage) of the latest drivers for your video card

If that's not working for you please post your results here so that anyone else can assist you. :user:

Thanks for the reply.

I spent another hour fiddling with it...I actually managed to fix the problem by disabling every single audio codec I could find using K-Lite. Not sure which one was causing the problem...I'll have to go back through and re-enable one by one (not something I'm looking forward to testing). But it fixed the problem, so whatevs. Weird thing though...I still have audio in Oblivion even though I disabled all audio codecs. What's decoding the Oblivion audio files now?

The Ob music files are in .mp3 format so many times codecs such as for I-tunes, Quicktime, etc. will make themselves the default for running the .mp3 files and this will cause problems since some of those programs actually try to get web info on any mp3 before opening it causing delays in playing the music -- If you disable the audio codecs it is probably back to using the default MS codecs which is what the game was designed to use !