By the ghost of Zurin Arctus, I believe I've done it!

So, as some of you may or may not know, certain graphics cards (mostly integrated graphics cards, like my laptop) have a certain issue when HDR is enabled for Oblivion. The entire screen goes flat gray (or black for some people), except the HUD and UI work just fine and the game performs normally, it's just the player is "blind", I suppose. http://www.gamespot.com/forums/pc-mac-discussion-1000004/blank-screen-in-oblivion-hdr-with-nvidia-9-series-26391284/ a couple different people talking about the same http://steamcommunity.com/app/22330/discussions/0/846957366828253802/ I had the problem too, and the only solution that seemed to work was to completely not use HDR, which svcks.

But check it out. I was fooling around with a tweak on the UESP listed under stuttering fixes, here's the quote in full:

The tl;dr of it is that Oblivion can mistake what shader package your graphics card can support and stick you with a lesser one. My RenderInfo.txt told me I was on shaderpackage002; I followed the quoted instructions and replaced that shader package with shaderpackage019 (make a backup! Seriously! If you don't I can't love you!).

Now, my game is normally set to just have Bloom on, so when I fired it up I actually got a black sky from doing this. But when I switched out Bloom for HDR (in-game menu, not via launcher, in case there's a difference) and fired up Oblivion again, I had no problems! And HDR was working in all of it's high-dynamic glory!

I only just found this out, so I haven't played for long to see if there's any side-effects, but so far it seems to be running as expected. I'll play the game for a bit and update this thread if anything goes awry.

But if anyone else suffers the same issue I had, try this out and tell me if it helps! For reference, my graphics card is "Mobile Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family". Truly the cutting edge, I know.