Been playing for a while using BC and thought I would try adding OBC to see how it would change the feel of the game. Installed using OBMM and went to Leyawin to check it out. Seemed to work nicely. Went to Bravil and game began crashing with any attempt to come close to city. Did make it through gates once. Note, the "old" gates were still there and the Open ones were also. Tried to just deactivate the omod but got all sorts of error messages and couldn't get game to run right after that. Had been thinking about doing a fresh install to clean some things up so uninstalled game and am now in process of re-installing. In the game i uninstalled I was running Blood and Mud with the patches etc. Also I BOSS and BASH everything regularly.

I looked on the forums for several hours yesterday to see if I could find any info on possible conflicts between BC and OBC or any tricks when installing both. Questions. Are they fully compatible? When looking at the files they have identically named .esp's, which one should you use? Any knowledge, tips or insights will be greatly appreciated.

Duplicate gates sounds like you did not make a clean save after removing BC, before adding OBC.

They should be fully compatible. You must install OBC first, then install BC allowing BC to overwrite any OBC files it wants to.

You must NOT use any ESPs for the same city from both mods. So for example, do NOT use BC Full and OBC Full; do NOT use BC Bravil and OBC Bravil.
No part of OBC touches the Imperial City at all, so you can use any IC-related BC files without worry of conflicts.

They should be compatible, but might not be. Some changes in the BC ESM since the final release of OBC might have broken things when used with OBC. I don't think they have, but cannot make any promises.

Thanks for the quick replies. Especially about the install order. Didn't find that on forums but searching returns so much it's easy to miss some things. Will give it a try.