I think I've finally reached the point where I have too many mods running. it seems all most consistent that when walking around Battlehorn castle while playing today I would crash all most instantly. The problem is I go on here and see so many good mods and people that talk about where they got their armor or weapons that I think "oh this would be awesome in my game". Well now I'll have to go through and figure out what mods I want to sacrifice so that I can be able to play my game and not have it crash every couple of minutes.

It all depends on the mods interacting. I run pretty ok with my list, and cleaning them helps probably.
I have also done some merges as well.

I'd suggest taking it easy while installing a bunch of new mods (one at a time is the golden rule), and really reading the "50 Steps to stable FCOM" thread...

yeah I took it easy only installing 1 or 2 at a time. But now I've got so many that I probably should trim out the ones I don't really need.

I've learnt my lesson too - but now BOSS, BAIN, BOMM, Gamebooster, a really high-end PC, Tomlong's website and the gurus at this forum have led me to an acceptable level of stability with my 254-active mods FCOM-BC-UL game...*fingers crossed*

Still I get an unexplained crash every now and then, and get exasperated though!

Learn to use Wrye Bash and crack open mods every now and then to see what they do. TES4Files and some other utilities can help you find out what an .esp or .esm is doing. Many many mods can be merged and bashed with some exceptions. I would suggest if you plan on playing a modded Oblivion for very long to learn how to use Wrye Bash and other utilities to cut down on the amount of actual .esps that need to be loaded.

Also a good fair amount of crashes occur because of graphics and processing errors. Just an FYI.

That's all the advice I got

yeah I have more then a couple things that improve graphics in one way or another.

I already reached that point a long time ago, so I've already axed plenty of mods from my LO, including the Frans+Warcry section of FCOM due to content overload (I backlogged to MMM+OOO), Deadly Reflex (more due to conflicts than anything else), QTP3, and many more. I also recently took a look through my load order to figure out which mods were not being used often so I could remove those (sorry, Elsweyr). As a result, only 123 data files are active in my game (out of a total of 170, many more have been merged/imported into Bash).

My advice, don't add mods on whim anymore. Only add a new mod if you think it will really enrich the game experience (some of my latest additions include Enhanced Hotkeys, NRB4, and Cobl Balanced Races) and I rarely add ESM/ESP dependent mods anymore. I'm mostly limiting myself to replacers at this point.

yeah my most recent additions were immersive interiors, Enhanced Hotkeys, Cobl races.

I choose to think of downloading, installing and troubleshooting mods as an eternal, self-perpetuating Mini-game. Tweaking appearance sliders during chargen is another fascinating Mini-game for me.

Cheers to both activities! :foodndrink: