Yes, that's my experience as well. Not equipping a weapon is actually "equipping hand-to-hand," as one can see by looking at the character while in the Inventory window.

Exactly. I haven't played OB for a while now, but I believe you get the enchantments the shield has, but don't get the armor rating right? PLus it doesn't show up in the game. Just one of many exploits I suppose.

There's that too but I feel naked without some weapon equipped. Especially a staff.

FYI, you do not need a large pool of magicka at all. Two words: "spell chaining." You use Fortify Magicka and Fortify Intelligence to create a temporary pool of magcika that will cast whatever spell you wish to cast, and include the temp pool as part of the overall spell. This allows you to continually cast the spell. If you stop casting, of course, the temp pool evaporates and you have to wait to recharge (or drink a potion, or cast a small spell that creates a new, small, temp pool to start a new spell chain).

I offered very detailed explanations about how this works on the forums, so you should be able to find some of my posts by searching.

Thanks for the post but (and keep in mind that I'm a newbie here) how do you get to purchase those killer spells in the first place? You need like 700+ magicka for some of them. Previous posts explain that raising your luck and levels with the applicable spell school is the way to go. Do you have any other advise?

I don't know what kind of spell needs 700+magicka... to kill a dinasour? Maybe you didn't master one or two magic schools, and race/birthsign matters a lot to your total magicka, leveling up won't help a lot to your magicka, you could use restoration spells to fortify it, wearing self-enchanted clothes to increase your magicka and improve your magic skills to decrease the magicka you need to cast a spell. My mage is level 25 and only need 170+magicka to spell a lethal spell, my game difficulty is five small block higher than normal....I don't really know why you want a 700+magicka spell... Don't bother, according to someone, I'm a newbie too... maybe I'm wrong...

The amount of magicka is not 700+ and it's pretty much irrelevant, as I said, because you include the magicka cost in the spell itself as a temporary pool. For example, if a spell effect you want costs 50 magicka, Fortify Magicka is sufficient to continuously cast the spell (Fortify Magicka +100, 3 secs and spell effect). Fortify Magicka +100, 3 secs boosts your magicka by 100 for 3 secs, so casting a 50 point spell costs half the temporary boost and leaves 50 left over... which is enough to cast the spell again, leaving 50 left over... etc, ad nauseum. Same for higher cost spells up to 150 points but using a combination of Fortify Magicka and Fortify Intelligence (the calculation is a bit more involved, but not much, and the principle remains the same, of course).

Check the Hints forum and search for "spell chain." I posted very extensive explanations of how to build such spells last summer. Some of those posts might also be in this forum, but I know I had extensive discussions in the Hints forum (mostly helping some new players such as yourself).

If you want to know specifically where to buy or acquire certain spells or effects, you can check the UESP wiki.

As was mentioned in this thread by others, increasing magic school skill level decreases the cost of the spells in that school.

In addition, increasing Willpower increases magicka regen rate. High Willpower can make low cost spells continuously castable even without temporary magicka boosts.

I just make a bunch of stacking fortify intellect, magicka, and willpower potions, If the potions have different statistics at all they will stack and so you can make a truly huge magicka pool with the right combination. I am pretty sure they stack with fortify spells that you cast ass well, mainly because the potions have a much longer duration and so they have different stats.