Something weird is happening at the very start of Oblivion. This happens when only Oblivion.esm is checked to be loaded. No other mods are loaded.

I start the game with the face creation part at the opposite cell that I'm supposed to. I start at the Dunmers cell, and there is no face to customize. I just see the prison bars for the door. No vanilla race is able to be seen. If I load a mod (New Dimension) with custom races, they work fine. But I don't want a custom race at this time.

Like I said, this happens with only Oblivion.esm checked to be loaded, nothing else.

Please say someone has an idea as to what could be causing this...

EDIT:

Alternate start mods do not correct the problem. I still can't see the faces of the Oblivion races.

Maybe New Dimensions replaces the vanilla meshes or something crazy and it just goes plop. Have you tried on a completely fresh install??

Of Oblivion, yes. I reinstalled vanilla Oblivion with no change, but I kept all my resources from mods. I'm just going to start the game and run showracemenu. See if that corrects, or at least works around, the problem.

I thought showracemenu causes a bug/CTD or something?? Also, try reinstalling again, but in a different folder, to get rid of the resources from the mods, or uninstall via BAIN (if you installed that way). It might be some sort of freak bug caused by left over resources, and last time I checked OWC:ND was pretty crazy on the resource side of things .

Well, it doesn't matter because the same thing happens with showracemenu. I still can't see vanilla race faces. I tried loading the game with only Oblivion.esm checked. So, no other resource should be loaded. I'm starting to get irritated. This has never happened in all the years I've been playing Oblivion.

Well if OWC:ND replaces the races then it might ruin things for vanilla oblivion, because even if no .esp is loaded, textures/meshes in loose folders will over-ride those in the vanilla BSAs. Try reinstalling in a seperate folder (obviously don't delete your current folder so you keep all the mods you have) and see if you get the same problem. There's not much else to do, because the only difference between a truly vanilla install and your install is the extra resources floating around in the data folder.

Okay. I'll try reinstalling in a separate folder. After I try one thing...

You are right, AliTheLord. It was the resources in the Data folder. Specifically the "Meshes" folder. Instead of reinstalling to a different directory, I just moved the Textures, Sound, and Meshes folder out of the Data directory.

Now, what in the hell is causing that problem in the Meshes folder? It has to be the face related files, so, time to start moving folders...

Thanks.

EDIT:

On minute in the Characters folder, and BOOM! problem fixed. "It was the humanhead.nif" file that comes with All Male Bodies. I can definitely live without that file. One can't really tell a difference between the vanilla head mesh, and a custom one.

Thanks again, AliTheLord.

No worries. Not sure what the exact problem is though. Does any of the OWC:ND stuff come packaged in a BSA?? If it does then the replaced meshes for the face might point to different textures that are in the BSA, which isn't being loaded. That's fairly wild speculation though. Someone with more experience with face meshes/textures could probably offer you some advice.

EDIT: Ignore the above then, as you fixed it.