I got Oblivion GOTY a few months ago and just got around to installing it and it seems to work fine, except that it keeps freezing. I had no problems installing it or getting it to start, it has not even crashed to desktop. I can get the game to start, but it only runs for a minute or so before it just freezes. It doesn't crash, it just freezes for a couple of minutes then it goes back to normal for a minute or two, then it will freeze again. It takes so long I can't even get through the introduction. I have tried uninstalling it and doing a clean install, I have tried running it with all settings as low as they go,I have tried shutting off all other background processes only oblivion was running. I have tried alt tabbing out of it into task manager and checking only two cores, I have tried running it under windows xp sp2, I have tried editing the ini file that others have said helped performance, but it won't stop frezing every few minutes. It's the same problem that I had with Fallout 3, before I finally got so fed up with it freezing that I got rid of it. My hardware exceeds the minimum requirements (core 2 quad 6600, 3gb ram, geforce 9800 gt).This (and Fallout 3) is the only game that i've had a problem like this with. Tell me what I'm doing wrong. Any help is appreciated.

Well make sure you have all the latests patches official and unofficial, maybe something like streamline and oblivion stutter remover (requires OBSE) might help.
Not to sure about your hardware but if you say it meets requirements then I can't offer any advice that will help I'm afraid as not to up on that side of things.

Does a new music track start playing whenever it unfreezes? If you don't have a dedicated sound card, Oblivion can really bog you down trying to play the music.

If you didn't already try disabling the music in-game (bMusicEnabled in the INI), try it and see what happens.

Thank You! I tried disabling the music and it works great now. I can run it on max settings now and it runs perfectly as far as I can tell. I've been playing for a few hours now and haven't had any problems. I didn't think that the audio would have been the problem, but it seems that it was. Again thank you for your help.