What would be the benefits of exiting to the main menu? Once you're there, you don't want to load any saves due to the well-known game engine bug where data from the previous gameplay often bleeds into the loaded save, creating a mess. Once exited to menu, you'd need to quit to desktop then relaunch the game anyway to ensure you don't suffer that bug, so might as well just quit to desktop then relaunch the game anyway.

Again my experience with both Oblivion and Fallout3 is that ctds are the most common event accompanying not being able to exit to main menu. Seen it over and over again.

It is not about needing to get to the main menu as much as it is a symptom.

In fact I cannot think of a time where removing a mod (or one side of a conflict) that caused this did not lead to more stability.

I must say that I've never heard of that 'well-known game engine bug' before. Apparently I don't read anywhere near enough threads. But that sounds perfectly feasible, and could quite probably explain a lot of things. This game is primarily an engineering challenge, rather than a game, after all. I'll take that on board. Ta.

I've heard it is scripts that keep running even after you reload but that it can also mess with quest stage progress.

I wonder how much OBSE exacerbates this - and if maybe an OBSE plugin could be made to address this by calling an end to processes. They would have to be identified though.

Thanks for catching that - I really shouldn't post when well past my bedtime...

Do keep in mind that even with nothing but pristinely cleaned mods of superior quality, you can still provoke crashes when dropping to the main menu. That's ALWAYS been a crapshoot with anything other than the vanilla game. The routines that are supposed to reset things simply don't do it right. You'd actually be better off just reloading on the fly from inside the game itself in that case, and we all know how iffy that can be. (we do, don't we?)

Obviously the best pairing for getting out in one piece is FastExit 2 and dropping to desktop before reloading. Painful, but corrupt saves are no fun.

Nah, CTDs are the most common event accompanying PLAYING the game.



Well it is well known The game sometimes fails to completely clear its cache when loading a save having already been playing, causing some references from the previous game session to be transferred into the reload. Quitting to desktop properly clears the game cache.