I've had Oblivion for a few years now, and it's worked great until recently. The only drastic change I've made to my system is installing Windows 7 64 bit - before that I was running Windows XP 32 bit.

My problem is that the game freezes up momentarily at seemingly random times. Sometimes there is a specific event that seems to trigger it (like right after I kill an enemy or before I receive a message), but otherwise it appears to lock up every now and then.

Specs:
Motherboard: GigaByte GA-M57SLI-S4 nForce 570-SLI Chipset
CPU: AMD Athlon?64 X2 5200+ Dual-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology
GPU: XFX PVT88SFDD4 GeForce 8800GS XXX 384MB Superclocked Alpha Dog Edition
HDD: 2 X 250GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 8MB Cache 7200RPM
RAM: 4GB PC6400 DDR2/800 Dual Channel Memory
PSU: OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI

I also took some gameplay video of the freezes, so you can see what's happening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lTZIS9ipGQ. The first freeze happens at about 1:13

I've searched and searched for a solution, but haven't been able to find one specific to my problem. Any feedback you all have will be greatly appreciated!

Golg

Well, I think I found a solution (kinda):

As many other sites have suggested, setting bMusicEnabled=0 in Oblivion.ini seems to fix the problem. The game is a bit dull without music, though, so does anyone know a way to fix this and keep music enabled?

Many thanks!

Do you have an onboard sound chipset? Oblivion doesn't like those.

EDIT: Looking at the vid, it's probably your sound hardware. Like I said, Oblivion is notorious for not playing nicely with integrated sound chipsets. You already know the workaround, and I would also recommend you get http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12331 mod to deal with other problem sounds that might cause stuttering for you.

The only way to actually fix this is to invest in a proper sound card.

Hmm... interesting about the sound card. I do have an onboard, but it's the same exact card I used before, and I had no problems with it then.

Thanks for the link to that download and your reply!