I have been wondering about this - has anyone ever done any work on trying to work out how Oblivion loads mods and how much RAM it uses?

I ask because a while about I tried adding Tamriel Heightmaps, and it just KILLED my game - dead. I couldn't change cells without it crashing.

This makes no sense EXCEPT that the Heightmap esp is about 150mb and the Valenwood landscape I was using was 127mb or so - a total of 280mb, and I'm running a 32bit OS still.

So I started thinking - when Oblivion loads up it has to load ALL your mods, doesn't it? Otherwise it wouldn't know which were conflict winners or loosers, and presumably it has to know that even before it loads the next cell.

I.e. lots of esp's are a resource hog, and every patch esp is more data the game has to parse before it even loads up.

Thoughts?

I may have completely the wrong end of the stick.