Ok, bit of a complicated string of events here.

I origionally had this working as it came (vanilla goty edition). I was told about the overhaul mod, which sounded interesting to me (as i need something to keep me occupied until skyrim) and i loved vanilla MW from the get-go.

Now for snag #1 : to get this working origonally (it was a cple years ago) i remember something about having to delete certain, if not all, of the music files that came w/ the game. It wouldnt work otherwise.
Snag #2 : Installed the mod, it was working great until it came time to level up. It hung on the level-up screen, and i had to force-quit it. Thinking that maybe it had something to do w/ the missing level-up music, i uninstalled then reinstalled both the game and the mod. This time around, it seemed to run fine w/ the music intact, until it came to loading games (didnt even make it to level up this time around).

So i uninstalled again, this time not applying the mod, and testing things out on vanilla. The game installs fine, i can start a new game fine, but it still freezes and locks up on loading a previously made save (quick save, auto or manual). It seems to SAVE just fine, but throws a fit when it comes to loading.
Ive tried all of these fixes, and nothing seems to help :

installing outside of the normal programs file (regular or x86)
Running everything i can as admin / in compatibility mode
Running resolution at a lower setting at first
Clearing the cache (assuming this was referring to the general cache-clearing, couldnt find anything specific to morrowind)
Making sure all music files are correctly assocated w/ wmp

My drivers for gpu / soundcard / mb are all up to date. Im running vista home premium (64bit) with a quad-core cpu and 8 gigs of memory.

So to sum everthing up : it used to work as vanilla, it (mostly) worked with the overhaul mod. Now i cant get it to work either way >.> Any idea's, guys n' gals?

Did you play it before you switched to Vista?

Vista is known for not being friendly to games made before it came out.

Yeh, i was playing it on vista less then a week ago, before i was pointed to the overhaul mod. Thats whats getting to me, it -WAS- working just fine before. Now it dosnt work, one way or another, as vanilla or mod'd w/ the overhaul.

I should also note that ive run the registry cleaning program that was reccomended elsewhere on this forum.

Vista may be the problem, then, unless you haven't deleted the mod itself from the folders.

So does anybody have any ideas, besides vista being the issue? I had this working on vista, both on vanilla AND with the overhaul mod.

Ive uninstalled and reinstalled in 4 diff locations so far, and it always ends up being the same issue :

Now it simply freezes whenever i try to load a save. If i can get past this, ill see if it freezes on level up (which was my 2nd concern)

Edit : after staying up much later then i should have, i FOUND A SOLUTION.

Ironicly enough, it was the same thing that i ended up doing years ago. Moving the entire music file (this includes any custom music files that mods generates, including the overhaul mod) completely out of my morrowind install folder, and putting it elsewhere on my system. I have to deal w/ the warning box each time i start MW up, but now i can load my save games, and level up w/o freezing. And i can also quit MW normally, w/o having to force-quit it. (might not work 100% of the time, but ive ran it 3 times now, and i was able to normal quit the game every time)

Perhaps add this trick to the sticky for fixes? might help others in the future..