I'm starting to have some problems with my Oblivion install. This would be the second time the below issue has happened, within two months of each other..:

Today, when I started Oblivion, to test out a model I had made, the game naturally first pops up the "Bethesda" logo...but there is no music nor sound whatsoever. When it reaches the Main Menu screen, where you can click on "Options", "Load", etc - I can't click on the buttons, because whenever I hover my mouse over any of the buttons, the screen freezes. I did notice, that if I move my mouse upwards on the screen away from the buttons, after the freeze, that the screen unfreezes...until I move my mouse back over the buttons again. All this time, there is no sound. I always have to use "CTRL + ALT + DELETE" to start "Task Manager" so I can stop Oblivion and exit the game.

I have Windows 7, but the game is not installed in the "C:\Program Files" directory. So UAC should not be causing this.
I tried with and without OBSE. (I manually deleted the OBSE files from the Oblivion directory).
I deleted all OBSE plugins I had and tried again - that did not help. (EnhancedMusicControl and SoundCommands were the only two I had)
I tried to simply load Oblivion, with SI, & no OBSE - no change.
I tried using the Oblivion.exe, OblivionLauncher.exe, obse_loader.exe - all to no avail.
I uninstalled, and then reinstalled, OBMM - this did not fix it.
I had made a backup copy of my Oblivion install, under different name, about a month before. I tried copying key files from the backup location, back into my main working Oblivion install. This did not help.

I can't think of any major software changes I've had done to my PC recently, except for upgrading to Ventrilo 3.0.8, and getting "Dead Island" game off of Steam...

Has anyone else had this issue? Does anyone know how to fix this, without having to reinstall Oblivion/SI all over again?

Koniption

Did ventrillo install any of its own codecs by any chance?

No, I don't think Ventrilo installed any codecs.

But I did solve the issue just now:

I use the retail disc version of the game. I keep my Oblivion disc in my DVD drive, so that I can run the game whenever I need to.

I looked at my DVD drive while Oblivion disc was still in there, and rightclicked on that drive, and chose "Open", to look at the files within the disc.

I suddenly saw that there was a "desktop.ini" file that was "waiting to be written" to my Oblivion disc! I totally don't remember ever dragging such a file onto that drive, or anything like that. I don't know where it came from. So I deleted that "waiting to be written" file from the Oblivion disc's drive. Oblivion then started up normally - music playing and buttons clickable.

I also went into Ventrilo, and changed the "Overlay" setting to have the "Vista on nVidia tweak to force display of overlay" box checked.

I think it was the deletion of the "desktop.ini" file, though, that fixed things.

Koniption

Cool, at least ya got it working.