This is mostly a curiosity but I've been trying to get Oblivion stable forever and I'd love some informed input. I'm running only a handful of mods but I use Stutter Remover's heap replacement option (mode 6, 1024) and also recently enlarged the secondary heap to 512MB using the More Heap mod.
Now it seems far more stable than I've ever had it but I noticed Oblivion.exe is using 1.5GB. The game starts at around 450MB and slowly increases over the course of a few hours to 1.5GB, this indicates to me that the engine really is using all that extra memory rather than just allocating empty heap space.
I'm just quite surprised that the vanilla game will eat up so much address space if you let it. If this is the case then surely at some point (without the various heap enlargements) the game wouldn't be able to allocate any more, causing a crash...does this sound about right?