Thought I might as well ask here (though I don't know if I should be asking for a mod or a patch).
Quite simply the only reason I don't play Oblivion is because I cant Alt-Tab, that's how much it pisses me off.
Has anybody come across any patches/mods that fix this?
Any help would be gratly appreciated becuase I have a heap of friends who have the same problem.

I find my system alt tabs much more effectively if i force it to run in a window and have a non related window already open before I run it, to alt tab to, as a posed to alt tabing to desktop. Don't know why this is, but it works on my machine and OS (vista home premium )

no message sorry, my fault.

Alt-Tab is an iffy proposition in Oblivion. Sometimes it works and usually not. Bethdesda did not make it to play nice with windows task switching. They expect it to be the only program you are running at the time. When I first started playing I went through the same thing. I wanted to be able to switch out to check email or to look up something for work ( I do telephone support from home.) After many crashes and reboots, I have learned to keep my work laptop on a nearby table for my work, and to run Oblivion with the internet connection disabled. This forces me to exit the game every hour or so to reply to work related email as my work laptop is not enabled for internet (company policy).

Most of the time it seemed as if the alt-tab had worked, but then Oblivion froze, either immediately on switching back to the game or within a few seconds. Usually when I tried to move. It worked better in windowed mode, probably allowing me to resume the game 60% of the time, but I seemed to have many more in game CTDs then when I did not alt-tab out and back in.

My suggestion is to find a way to not alt-tab. Use a quick save and exit mod - I think I remember seeing something like this in the mods at one time. Then restart with the save that it creates when you are ready to play again.

If you come up with a better solution please post it because I know I would like to be able to reliably switch between the game and something else also.

What about saving, exiting to the title screen, alt-tabbing and doing whatever you need to do, and loading the save? No idea if this would work, but it seems more promising than alt-tabbing with a game loaded.

You can Alt-Tab in Windowed Mode, by the way. But playing full screen looks better of course.

Never use alt-tab. The issues cannot be resolved; the game freezes or otherwise is unplayable in about 95% of all alt-tab events.
This applies to other programs running and minimizing Oblivion, such as AVG or any other virus program, or keyboard software.

Disconnect from the internet and always close all programs down before running Oblivion. Though my virus scan is scheduled to run at noon everyday, so if I play Oblivion and it reaches noon, Oblivion minimizes and AVG starts up. I always growl with frustration because I know as soon as I return to the game, it most likely will be locked up and I’ll have to restart from a previous save.

With me, the game just simply ignores any attempt to minimise it...even Ctrl+Alt+Del...

Sometimes I find that when I can see the regular windows mouse cursor in the top corners, if I click, Oblivion will minimize but it will not freeze when I return to it. However, I have no clue as to why this happens, but it is rather frustrating when you try and fight and suddenly you are looking at your desktop.

I play in windowed mode and i find it perfctly fine. it runs faster, better graphics (well i have kinda crappy pc) and i can see the time. and on top of that i can have notepad beside it to look for console commands.

but on topic, if u have oblivion in windowed mode and something like notepad on aswell, usually you should be able to alt+tab

The thing about windowed mode is that there couldn't be an easier way to ruin immersion. You're sitting there fighting, and you begin to feel a part of the game, then you notice the taskbar, and everything crumbles.

i just hook my moniter up to my laptop and hey presto i got 2 screen's one for oblivion and one for w/e

The problem is the Windows graphics subsystem. In XP or earlier you only get one real GUI thread and you can't interrupt it, so alt-tabbing tends to freeze when Oblivion can't release the graphics resources.

Vista is supposed to have real mult-threading graphics support, but I haven't upgraded yet. Anyone running Vista out there who can report on this?

-Jumonji

I've never had a problem alt-tabbing yet (of course you need to have something else up first). The only freeze up/non-compatibility issue I have is when not being online when oblivion is closed and error occurs. Apparently vista hates that because it's trying to check for online solutions. Big surprise. There aren't any the 489th time either!

I have Vista, and Oblivion simple ignores Alt+Tab...as I said earlier. Although...I don't have Vista, per sae; I have Vista Ultimate. That might be different.

That's what I have and it's the most complete version of Vista, so it wouldn't be missing features if anything unless it's strictly a bug. I wish I could say why it works on my machine and not yours. Patch version of OB? I have the latest official one.