i am experiencing a bug that is causing a crash when certain npcs equip certain items. i have come across two instances so far. a bandit who crashes the game as soon as he equips his bow, and then an imperial forester who causes the game to crash when he equips his torch. is this a known bug? i tried reinstalling the program but this has not solved the problem and i am worried that it is eventually going to happen with an npc that i cannot simply avoid. i am running patched v1.2 (not goty)

is this a problem with my system then? i tried uninstalling, doing a scan disk and defrag on the c drive, then reinstalling oblivion and the patch, but its still happening at the exact same moment. this is especially frustrating because this is the same bug (or system conflict) that caused me to stop playing my char years ago when i first bought the game. i know my vid card isnt great, but im not running the game at high settings or anything

i also really enjoy how both times the bug waited until i had sunk a bunch of hours into my file before manifesting itself.

I don't know what to say about this. Are there any mods installed? Maybe there are files missing. Give up on the PC version if your experiences so many problems.

not running any mods. i could just break down and buy the xbox version, but i hate trying to aim spells/arrows with a joystick, its like a drunk man trying to aim at a urinal. plus i would feel like a chump for paying for the game twice. ive payed for the game i should be able to play it. ive just wasted do much of my time to no avail. i really like the game but ive never been able to play through the whole thing because its like the buggiest game in history. in short, thanks for wasting a bunch of my time bethesda. twice. hope you enjoyed my 60 dollars.

There is a glitch that effects some systems caused by NPCs or the player equipping certain bows (mostly higher quality) that Beth left the reach set to zero on (this causes a divide by zero calculation which crashes some systems (while others ignore it) - Brash had a fix for it and IIRC it was also included in the unofficial OB patch. http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/561101-unofficial-technical-faq/page__view__findpost__p__8103712