So I wanted to check if shivering Ises and Knights of the Nine were installed on my PC, so I opened the date files, and they were active, yet there was a file called oblivion master file, and there was no X through it. Should I activate it? Or does it matter? I was able to play without it active....

ALSO. When I change the game to ultra settings, when I go into the game options while playing, I can still increase some stuff, will that effect ultra, or am I effectively setting it higher than default ultra?

If SI is correctly installed, you will get a message in-game stating that a strange island has appeared. This happens after about a day, on a new character, if I recall correctly. If KOTN is correctly installed, you will hear about the Prophet in Anvil, and there will be changes to the chapel in that city.

The "ultra" settings you made on startup include some things that are not available in the in-game options menu, like shaders.

Be warned that Shadows in Oblivion are broken, especially "Shadows on Self." Best to turn that option off.

Good to know, I hit ultra, then put the resolution to 1920 x 1080, that doesnt effect anything does it? How about that master fule?

There are medium/high/ultra buttons in Oblivion Launcher too, like in Skyrim? Hm, my Oblivion Launcher only has resolution, AA, fullscreen/windowed, VSync, Bloom/HDR and Distant Land. No pre-made settings to choose.

Its on the bottom right hand corner, I chose ultra, and then had to manually select 1920 x 1080.

Yes, I know what you are talking about.

You can chose your quality, but when you chose your resolution, make sure it is right, otherwise you will have problems.

This isn't the launcher. This is a dialog box that comes up the first time you run Oblivion, or after it detects a change of hardware. You can force it to come up by deleting or renaming the Oblivion.ini in your My Documents.

Oh i know its 1920 x 1080, but no worries, thanx.

Yep dependss on which version of the launcher you have -- The original did not have it -- shortly after release they did a patch to correct some problems with the NVIDIA FX series cards that they had said the game coould run on but Nvidia had taken some shortcuts in the implementation of some features so getting around any fires caused the game to drop to 1FPS or less !! So they patched it and created a Ultra Low setting for those cards and at the same time added the other presets to the launcher. Then IIRC they again removed them when SI was released with a new patch so some games have them and others do not. ( I have to have the version with the presets in order to play as mny ATI 5770 is auto detected as an Nvidia FX57xx series card and defaults to ULTRA LOW every time I update drivers so I need the preset to turn back on the effected shaders etc. or the game doesn't work correctly as there is no in game way to reenable those settings !

Here's a screenshot off the presets -- http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc189/JDFanning_bucket/settings-4_zpsfad2a6cd.jpg?t=1368677641