I recently started playing Oblivion after several years and I suddenly thought "oh yeah, that bloody A-Bomb thingy!, so I checked my most recent saves and noticed that the counter is sitting at 48, I've only been playing for 90 hours so I was quite surprised to be this close to A-Bombing, does that final tick to 49 take a very long time or is something weird going on with my game?

i've never run into it myself, but here's a link to some tech info which also has a link to a fix if you run into it:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Technical_Support#Stuck_Door.2FSlow_Framerate_on_Some_Animations

Thanks but I'm already using the fix, I'm mostly just curious why my game is getting close to the A-Bomb after 90 hours

I may be showing my ignorance here (it is bliss after all), but isn't there an option to remove abomb in WyreBash?

Aye, that there is. OP knows of a fix. He (?) is just surprised that the bomb is about to kick in after less than 100 hours. Me too. I've never seen it kick in so low at the start of a play-through.

Yeah I've got the problem under control, but as Decrepit said, I'm slightly alarmed at how quickly it was approaching, I'll paste my load order in case anyone can spot a suspect mod, I recently swapped out Quest Award Leveller for Auto Update Leveled Items And Spells.

The latest UOP series incorporate all the previous supplementals. You shouldn't need 'UOPS Additional Changes.esp'. Also, 'Merged.esp' sounds like something you created yourself? If so, what's in it?

You have a number of mods I've never seen before, which is not surprising with a returning player. Have you run http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/20516 and applied it's suggestions such as newer versions or cleaning? Very important. BOSS is the best source of collected wisdom on mod compatibility issues.

-Dubious-

Thanks for the reply, yeah my load order is entirely BOSS sorted and I've cleaned all the flagged mods, I'll look into the Additional Changes file but it was definitely installed by the UOP setup program. The Merged.esp is a function of Tes4Edit, it detects conflicts in the levelled lists and creates a file with all the changes incorporated, it's not as comprehensive as a Bashed patch but I've manually looked over all the edits and they look fine.

Don't use a Merged Patch with Oblivion. Use a Bashed Patch and if you want to merge mods, use TES4Gecko

What type of system do you have and what type of FPS do you get ? The A-bomb is tied to the FPS off the system and higher FPS systems will run into it faster so if you have a high end system and get a high FPS you'll run into the A-bomb faster than normal ( this is why the Xbox users do not run into it until later as their systems run the game at 30FPS )

This is the direction I'm leaning, my PC is pretty beefy and I rarely get less than 60fps but I'd have thought other people would also be getting the early A-Bomb what with crazy fast cpu's being a common thing nowadays