I hope I'm not the only one with this problem. Oblivion seems to be crashing for me at some pretty inconsistent points. If i try to fast travel, move between areas, go into or come out of towns or dungeons or kill something there is a possibility that the game crashes. This possibility is heightened when I am 'outside' in the wilderness.

One example of this would be when I left a dungeon (I now save before i leave every dungeon). It crashed when i tried to get out into the wilderness, then when i started it up again, it crashed at the same place, the third time i got outside (saved) tried to fast travel, crashed, started it up again, then i was crash free for the next 2 hours.

Why does this happen?

I crash on two occasions. If I autosave and exit the program. I try to load the game, and it crashes halfway through the loading.

The other time is when I either pull an Alt-Tab to minimize it so I can adjust the volume, or if my firewall pops up a message (I have ZoneAlarm).

I've had a few crashes for no apparent reason at seemingly random times. I expect all new games to be a little buggy, and I save often just in case. I suggest saving often under different files (not just using quicksave) for the following reason:

I have identified two instances where my saved games were "unusable." In the first case I quicksaved the game and upon completion of the save my framerate dropped to like 12fps and stayed there. I exited the game, rebooted, and when I loaded that same save file I still had the framerate problem. Loading a different save game (even without exiting the game again) cleared the problem up.

The second saved game problem I had involved a glitch where I entered a store, everything appeared normal, and I went to the kitchen to grab a coke, came back and my screen was completely black. I could access the menu through ESC still and I saved the game and tried to reload it several times and my screen continued to be blank.

Not sure what caused the corruption in the game, but whatever it was carried over to the save files in both cases.

So, like I said, I suggest saving frequently over multiple files to ensure you always have a relatively recent save point that you can back up to in case of crash. All new games are buggy at first, they'll get it patched sometime, I'm sure.

What system specs do you have, curious if there is any similarity to others who are having crashes. My specs are as follows:

AMD 64 3400+
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT (Latest 84.25 beta Forceware Driver)
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
1.5 GB RAM

unfortunatly with games as big as Morrowind and Oblivion you will never get away from crashes...however they can be caused by anything no matter how small or how big

I have noticed Zonealarm in most games can become a major pain..best way of getting around this is turning off notifying replies and so on

outdated drivers on video cards and sound cards can cause some crashes along with not enough RAM and so on

maybe lessening the video settings may help and such