Perhaps a silly question - but my tests seem to point to the idea.

When running at a very high framerate, some of my scripts that are meant to process in one frame don't completely finish. For example, a adding 10 separate items to a players inventory. It'll add every single one if running at a basic 30 fps, but on minimum settings when I am running very high framerates, the script won't add everything.

This is the only thing that's changing.

There are obvious work-arounds, of course, but can anyone shed insight on this phenomenon?

That seems about right. You can only successfully add a few things per frame in Oblivion. This was mstly fixed in FO.

I actually tried again and I don't think that was my problem here. After changing my settings to low, I didn't think to boot up with OBSE and the script used a few "additemNS" lines.