ok, I have a problem. I have no idea which mod, or combination of mods, is causing this, but .. well take a look at this screenshot.



It's not on all NPCs, but a lot of them. A few guards, some enemies, etc.
I'd like to know if there's any way to manually fix this without having to either go through all my mods one at a time (again!) just to find out which blasted one is causing it, or having to reinstall.
It looks like something that's only meant to be seen in the CS, so I'm hoping there's some way of correcting this using the CS.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

What you have is the infamous missing mesh graphic. What it means is you have misplaced one of the meshes from a mod you installed. I would check the last few mods installed,. Save where you see the graphic and disable your last few mods one at a time until it goes away. Then check that mod to see what meshes it has and where they are supposed to go - usually in the Oblivion/data/meshes folder. If they are in the wrong folder, usually you can manually copy them where they belong.

When I see that I usually find the meshes in the data folder instead of the /data/meshes folder. BTW, the mesh files are the .nif files.

I think we have all seen that at one time or another. Some, like me many times.

I see.. many thanks, I'll give that a try

You could also narrow the search by considering which mods you have that alter NPCs, whether it be by adding clothing, armor or weapons; or anything requiring a new mesh.
If it is only occurring on NPCs then logically it will be an NPC altering mod.
Also, if you recently deactivated such a mod and loaded a save from before where NPC's had these items equipped you could get the '!' mark.

Ah, well that's the problem, I have a few mods that alter NPCs and some that alter NPCs clothing and items.
This is gonna take a while, I better just get on with it. *sigh*

thanks guys

ok, I've just disabled every mod I have and it's still doing it! I have no idea what's causing it.
am I going to have to re-install?!

If you disabled them, than that leads me to think one of those mods actually replaced (over-wrote) some original content with a bad file.
If that's the case you not only have to find out which one it is but copy the original file back off the game disk, unless you backed them up.

Phew.. I actually backed-up a little while ago, so shouldn't be too much of a problem.. just trying to figure out what the hell it was - if it was clothing then.. well they were wearing different things, so I'm a bit lost.
Arg, so irritating - just gotta go through them all I guess.

Thanks for the help guys.

Have you tried loading all your past saves and seeing if the missing mesh markers show up in all of them.
If the mod in question made NPCs equip new (non Bethesda) items and you disable it then those items will still be equipped in saves made after you activated the mod but have no mesh to refer to, hence the exclamation marks. But any saves made before you activated it shouldn't be affected unless they've overwritten Bethesda meshes and the game can't find the originals. Work your way backwards and check your saves before you re-install.

ah.. well I've already started reinstalling.. I tried going to a backup copy of my data folder from when I know it was all working, but then it just kept crashing before it even loaded the title screen. So I got hacked off with it and I've uninstalled the whole damn thing and I'm now going through the laborious process of reinstalling. At least this gives me the opportunity to not bother installing mods that I no longer use. Hopefully it'll run a bit more smoothly now too.