Hello. I recently purchased the Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition from steam on the PC which includes the original game along with Knights of the Nine and the Shivering Isles and was enjoying it up until it crashed about an hour ago. It first crashed after I taked tp the ORC leader of the fighters guild in Cheydinhal after completing the mission of delivering weapons to people and helping them clear out the Desolate mine of goblins.

Two of them died (the Redguard and the Elf) and I fast-traveled back to the local guild Hall. Before entering, I made a save. I walked in and talked to the ORC leader, and I was given 160 gold for my poor job. Infuriated, I tried to load a saved game right before I gave the people their weapons, but the game crashed (saying that Oblivion had encountered an unexpected problem), and I was back at the desktop. Knowing how faulty the game was sometimes (this was'nt my first time playing or my first copy), I went back into Steam and tried playing the game. The start-up went smoothly, but when I tried to load the same saved game again, the same result.

I then tried to load the save I made before entering the fighters guild hall earlier, but found the same proble with that. I tried using the autosave when I entered the hall, but the same problem. I tried loading another saved file, and to my surprise it worked, but it was hours upon hours of gameplay before my other two saved game files.

NOTE:
1)The loading bar of the saved game files would either not load or load a little bit before the game crashed.

2) My system is Windows Vista and all of my computers stats are up to date (by Oblivion's Standards), though I do use a NVIDEA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card and I've read that it Oblivion and NVIDEA cards go together like branston pickle and pus.

3) Are the files unsalvagable?)

If you used a quicksave or an auto-save when you restarted your game at any point in your playthrough, you will have this issue. Get into the habit of making and using hard saves.
I do not use Steam myself, but there have been quite a few posts made because the Steam version is missing Data for the game. Steam has a tool for checking the integrity of a download, and I would use that to see if your version of Oblivion is complete.