About 3 months ago my 9800GT broke down, and the sh*tty distributor needs 2 freaking months to find a replacement. As such, I left Oblivion (7200 GS isn't exactly the GPU you want to play Oblivion with)

At any rate, 3 months before it worked flawlessly (unless you count 20 fps as flawed), and now it just won't bother with me.I can start Oblivion alright, it's just that no title music is playing (and I swear I didn't disable title music in Oblivion.ini). I thought "well, no prob *shrug*" and proceeded to load a save, but then my Oblivion freezes and refuse to respond

I've confirmed that the title music is there in the right folder, and is playable.

Could it be driver issue? I'm using the latest driver, but I'm pretty sure driver doesn't mess with sounds, and won't freeze a game while it's loading a save.

Any help is appreciated, I can't wait to see my Haruka and code for her again.

Try renaming or deleting the oblivion.ini file (...\My Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Oblivion.ini)

Nope, doesn't fix a thing. It created a new Oblivion.ini alright, but the problem is still there

Backdate your drivers to a version previous to the release of the 400 series cards. Make sure to use some driver cleaning utility to be sure ALL traces of the newer drivers are gone.

Which drivers are you talking about? Is it the pre-260 ones?

9800 card was released in april of 08 it appears, so, grab some older drivers that came out AFTER that. (but, not much after....) see if the problem persists.

I'll just try to revert back to the last known working driver in my HDD (downloading a way too old driver is a bit overkill I think, because hey... it works before!)

Reverted back to 197.45, a driver from 4 months ago. No dice. This is getting annoying.

This is seriously WHAT THE ***K? I did a clan re-install and the problem still persists. Dear Lord, what the hell is going on?

This certainly is not a driver issue, because I have reverted to drivers back when it's still working

Do you have Windows 7, or Vista? Did you install, and reinstall, to the default directory of Program Files?

If so it's likely UAC is interfering and causing the issue to persist from a previous installation. Windows will "ghost" files, so to speak, and stores them in the Virtual Store, located at C:\Users\\AppData\VirtualStore. You need to completely remove any trace of Oblivion and then install it to an unprotected directory. Such as :\Games\Oblivion will work just fine.

No, I installed Oblivion in D:\Games\Oblivion. And like I said: it works before, and now not even after a clean reinstall

Also, I've disabled my UAC the first hour I installed my PC with 7

Okay, I've found the problem: a freakshow of install and uninstall of several media players seem to have screwed up my audio decoder. I installed K-Lite Codec Pack and instead of disabling it for Oblivion, I actually ENABLED it, allowing Oblivion to process the hell out of mp3s

NineDivinesdammit! If only I did this sooner, I wouldn't have to uninstall and encounter problems at all!