I need your help in troubleshooting this plague that has been haranguing me since forever. In my course of playing Oblivion since 2006, the one insurmountable problem I've had is the hang at the loading screen. The game starts up, I choose to resume a particular game, and then it starts loading, but just doesn't go anywhere, but hangs somewhere in the loading screen, with the bar stuck at some percentage. Finally, it CTDs after 5 minutes or so.

This problem does not happen if I choose to start a new game, but continuing an old save is a no-go. I've lost at least 3 characters (some 300 hr+) to this issue.

I've since figured out that this is due to Oblivion slowly eating up most of the available memory during loading, and finally crashing when the 4 GB threshold is reached in my current setup (4 GB patch installed). The task manager shows Oblivion at 3.1, 3.2 Gbs, then increasing slowly all the way to 3.8-3.9, finally crashing.

It has happened to me various times, but all the time, the only common theme is that I've changed something in my setup. One time, it was upgrading to a newer WB version (287->291), last time it was changing a bunch of mods. Yesterday, I changed a few things in my mod setup (upgraded DP's Melee Combat and UOPS), and recreated a merged esp that was working fine. Rebuilt bashed patch. Trying to load save game is useless now. Maybe I should have saved my last bashed patch, as that would have worked fine...

Is there a known cause for this? I can of course downgrade my mods that I changed since yesterday to recover my saved game...your thoughts?

How large are the actual save files? Tried the "remove bloat" and/or ABomb fix?

The only time I've ever run into a hang during a load bar is at the pre-menu logo screen. That's almost always caused by missing references that crept in somehow. Usually from a bashed patch that hadn't been rebuilt after making changes. I've never seen it happen while loading an existing save. The fact that it chews up all that memory makes it sound like the save is massive.