Ironically, Morrowind is easily one of the two best video games I've ever played (the other is Dawn of War), but also one of the buggiest. I think that there was just something wrong with the coding of the engine. Some of the crashes just didn't make sense. You could just be walking along and ... BAM!!! ... desktop. Anyhow, the game was so beautiful, big, and ambitious that I just learned to overlook the occasional crash and love Morrowind for the masterpiece that it is.

I found Oblivion to be much more stable, only crashing during the loading of some quicksaves. Fallout 3 was pretty stable as well.

Actually something that hasn't been mentioned here is that many mods eventually cause the game to run out of memory when you reach the 2 GB RAM ceiling, since Oblivion is a 32-bits application.

Mods that add higher resolution textures, revamp towns, add spawn points, and extra background scripts to the game will eat your resources very quickly, inevitable causing you to crash to your desktop after some hours (or minutes even) of gameplay. The same can also happen if you edit the .ini file.

Oblivion is optmized to run with all Vanilla features and the default .ini, even better than Fallout. But it's very poorly optmized in the way it handles threading and it's terrible when dealing with huge amounts of memory caching in modern PC hardware. Since Fallout and New Vegas also run on Gamebyro, periodic crashing on a heavily modded game is fairly common for both.

I have played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind on my pc, never had it crash to the desktop even when it has 25 - 80 mods running, but with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I do get regular crash to desktop, that even before I play the game, the problem on my pc, it isn't powerful to play Oblivion without using Oldblivion, even then I still get crashs to desktop when I load a save, or for some reason else, a part of the problem is Vista, it is very good with games like oblivion, even Trainz 2006 occasionaly crashes to the desktop, that annoys me as might be working on a extension to the railway / world and lose all the everything, I also have a Gaming Pc with a 3 Ghz dual core processor, 4 Gb Ram, and a Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX Graphic card and Oblivion crashes on that machine (I have 80 mods running), most of the CTD's are down to Windows Vista

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/5/57/F_5.gif

The vanilla games are remarkably stable and bug-free for me. I only start running into occasional CTDs when testing wip mods.

Vanilla Oblivion (i'm talking with all the expancion packs and the last patch) dont have much CTD's, but if you put in the game more than 200 mods (without any merge) it will CRASH LIKE HELL!

I dont mind crashes. What I mind is just a CTD with no error report on WHY it crashed.

In-between for me. With both Morrowind and Oblivion, across 4 different computers over time, I've had (on all systems used) times where I played heavily (4 hours per day minimum) and didn't see a CTD for a month, and times where I couldn't get an hour in without a CTD. Occasional runs where my stubbornness got me through 15-20 CTDs in the span of an hour...and then into another month-long no-CTD phase. That's with no mods whatsoever installed, or (maybe 10% of the time) 1 self-made one which amounts to a couple of fixed items added to a particular container. (Daedric pauldrons in a closet in Divath Fyr's tower in Morrowind, to be specific)

I've just taken to assuming that random unexplained unsolvable CTDs are just another of Todd's "features." Too bad, since he's all about looking for "extraneous" things to remove, that he apparently finds them something other than extraneous. I'd gladly suffer extraneous spears not being removed and extraneous CTDs being removed instead.

On the vanilla versions, or even with a small number of mods, I experienced no CTD when playing hundreds of hours of Oblivion, Morrowind, FO3, New Vegas. Except for the first time I played New Vegas, I had a crash to black screen because I had my graphics card overclocked too high. I set it to the correct setting and it did not CTD again, even though the playthrough lasted 160+ hrs.

After installing 100-150 mods for Oblivion, I experienced frequent CTD, maybe once every few hours of gameplay.

I then tweaked the Oblivion.ini for memory and other settings and installed a few stability mods that seemed to fix this problem:

NTCore 4GB patch
Oblivion Stutter Remover
WEOCPS
Fast Quit

64bit version go.
ram use to the max lol@2gb's.com

Both Morrowind and Oblivion has been pretty stable for me. I've used a couple of mods before but I prefer vanilla.