y, helo' thar everybody.

Im having major trouble with oblivion...it always randomly minimizes and when i maximize it will just crash forceing me to restart...how do i fix this random minimize crash? it's really bugging me...

my specs are as follows:


850w psu
Intel Q6600 cpu
Nvidia 8800gt 1 gig edition
2 Gig ram
Asus MSI P5N-T Deluxe Motherboard
Windows Vista™ Home Premium Service Pack 1

Nice video card! How does it run? When it's not crashing, I mean. I've got 4gb system memory, but my graphics card is a 512mb model.

I would imagine this is caused by something running in the background on Windows. Messenger? Something like that?

If not, are you running any mods that might cause weird glitches?

Oblivion likes to have the computer all to itself. It crashes a lot when you try to run it in a window. It will freeze and CTD most of the time when you try to use Alt-Tab to switch to another program. And if you have anything in the background that tries to go on line, such as some AntiVirus programs or anything that 'calls home' like some spyware programs. Also, I once had a defrag program that ran in the background, supposedly only when nothing else was running. When it checked to see if it could run it crashed Oblivion. Some older HP printer drivers are notorious for causing crashes.

Strange indeed this your issue. Although never have seem this problem reported before I'm inclined to think it's not an oblivion problem, not even a hardware problem... seems some key press combination is doing this. My advise is you checking the "accessibility" configurations or some other software monitoring key pressing.

Is not uncommon that another software sending messages to your machine can do this, too.

PS: I already saw something related, I recall now... related with the shift key pressed several times at short intervals, brings up a message from that Accessibilities, for sure

hi guys, i think it could may have been xfire giving me the problem...i turned it off and it's not minimizing anymore...so thank you for your help...i hope this post helps others....



cyas later...

Oh man, Xfire is notorious for problems like that.

The best thing to do is go through and turn off absolutely everything unnecessary before launching Oblivion, even if it's a bit of a pain. Ben is right, all kinds of troubles can be caused by defragmentors (had a similar issue myself) and things that don't really take "games" into account. They think you're just browsing the net or writing up a business document. Pff. Who needs 4gb RAM, a dual-core processor and nice video card for that? If it weren't for games, we'd still be running Pentium 100s.

I usually go into Task Manager and make sure everything is shut off, except the system files. Also, what I noticed with my game is when I turn off all the "saves on" in the games options to off it runs a lot smoother. It's a bugger when you forget to save, but it loads an area faster, and crashes less.