I'm curious. The CTD's I'm getting currently are really annoying. I've taken other people's tips and nothing is really helping. BOSS says that certain ESP's when merged may prevent CTD's (SoV and DR).

My assumption is that it won't. But I figured I may as well ask.

I've had it both ways and I assume you mean merging into bashed patch. I have enjoyed CTD free (3 in 80 hours) games using bashed patch, and had games that crashed every hour. But then I have been using bash since FCOM a few years back. The only time I had a CTD free game was just vanilla.

I have seen posts a few years back that claimed the bashed patched cause more CTDs but that was never proven or carried forward by any sizeable crowd. I think it comes to the mods. That is my $2.50 worth

I'm not trying to eliminate CTD's all together. That's an exercise in futility when it comes to heavily modded games. But, I recently started getting a 10 - 15 minute crash, up from 30 - 45 mins. For example, I didn't add any mods, and now I can't enter Northern Goods and Trade in Chorrol. It crashes every time.

I've merged every single mod that is able to be merged into the Bashed Patch except one. I'm play testing to see if it helps. I assume it won't help much because all the records are still there. But my hope is that being that there are fewer ESP's to load, the engine may not be as cranky. I'll see.

I'll post back after I play test some with the results.

Good luck. I have seen posts that suggest that the more mods merged into the bashed patch the better but I have not seen that personally. Now, I also see you testing the newest bash version. If using that, perhaps there are still some bugs to work out. I have my stablest games with v290 and not using cbash. If this is not the case here, good luck. But figure if things go south, something has had to change.

Less active being plugs seems more stable game.
One interesting thing - a few days ago I disabled ( I'm win7 user ) DEP . Much better.I've never had have such stable game.

DEP? Data Execution Prevention? Is that safe to do?

Bizarre, and a really bad thing to turn off https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Data_Execution_Prevention

Never had any reason to turn it off here.

Reference the OP, always had a really stable game with Bashed patch, on XP, Vista and 7, with multiple users - The only CTDs experienced were with my mistakes combining mods, or where a clean save was necessary with a mod installed for ages and I forgot the routine

We can play for hours on end no problems.

I hate you. :biggrin: But I have noticed a slight decrease in CTD's since I merged all my mods. Not much. I'm back to a CTD every 30 - 45 mins.

There was one very strong and opinionated name who shall not be named who went to great lengths to discredit Wrye's work, which was really bizarre and upset a lot of people, but more importantly there was never anything to substantiate the claims that Wrye Bash had it all wrong. Thousands of users since and before have on the whole proven quite the opposite that it works very well.

Even Wrye Bash's ancestor, http://wryemusings.com/#WryeMash (for Morrowind), was brilliant and was for me another essential to modding, having all those wonderful community efforts like Balmora Expanded running perfectly with a http://www.mwmythicmods.com/telesphoros.htm The only care that needs applied is understanding the mods and how much your machine can cope with really.

Edit: In fact a lot of basic advice http://www.mwmythicmods.com/starting.htm can still be applied to Oblivion.

Ooo ooo! Who can't be named?

pm in the post - the link given is the same prettyfly refers to below

or shall I just say it ... VOLDEMORT ,

Find Arthmoor's site and go through the archives, he's got something on the guy there. The mods don't really like people talking about him here though, so shhhhh....

Otherwise, I've found that CTD's go down when I reduce the number of esp's, so I would assume that merging mods would only help in that regard.

Yes. Not safe. But works for me.