Weird control freezing - please help!

[Darth Crow]

Hello, I've just bought the GOTY edition and tried to play completely vanilla (for nostalgia's sake). Trouble is, every time I try to play the game freezes within a couple of minutes.

Or rather - the game itself doesn't freeze, you can still see the world, characters and everything moving about, it just doesn't react at all to my input.

No idea why this happens and in all my years of playing Oblivion (since the release, really) I haven't had this happen. Googling didn't reveal any solutions.
Could anyone help, please? Thanks.

[Bomb Bloke]

Believe it or not, this is a common issue - and the game is bugging out because it doesn't like the media playback codecs installed on your system.

http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/561101-unofficial-technical-faq/

4.21 My mouse/keyboard becomes nonfunctional after 5-10 minutes.

This has become a very frequent problem as of late, likely having to do with codec issues. Possible solutions are setting the latest Media Player as the default for mp3 files or using a utility such as the K-Lite Codec Pack.

[Darth Crow]

Yeah, sorry, looks like poor googling skills on my side. I've already tried installing K-Lite to no avail. Windows 10 doesn't have the Media Player anymore, though. Is there any working alternative for that? I tried setting the association to Groove Music, which is the default player for Win 10 - didn't work.

[Bomb Bloke]

It may be worth disabling the game's sound / music in Documents/My Games/Oblivion/Oblivion.ini, just to be sure the matter is related. It'll work fine with them off, if so.

Personally I use K-Lite Mega, and the game works for me. I associate my MP3s with WinAmp, though I'm inclined to think that the file associations don't matter so much as a buried codec setting somewhere does.

I did find a report from one user who reckons a "Realtek's 3D soundback tool" triggered it in his case. If you've got that or anything similar, it'd be worth checking out - it's not terribly uncommon for computer manufacturers to include similar rubbish these days.

[Darth Crow]

Disabling music does indeed work, but I don't know... the game feels kind of empty without it. I don't have any bloatware, I only use clean Windows on all my computers.
One more thing to mention is that the music doesn't play in the game anyway, even if it is turned on.
I might try reinstalling the codec pack, but I'm not sure how much will that do...

[Bomb Bloke]

Originally posted by Darth Crow:

Disabling music does indeed work, but I don't know... the game feels kind of empty without it.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't suggesting that as a "fix", 'twas just to confirm the diagnosis!

[Darth Crow]

No worries, the diagnosis is most certainly confirmed. It's just the cure that is elusive...
By the way, an interesting side effect of turning music on is that my FPS seem to be capped at around 12 :D
I really have no idea what else to try...

[Bomb Bloke]

It may be worth checking what Task Manager has to say about your CPU load while the game is running - that low frame rate suggests that some process or other might flag itself as a culprit.

Another shot in the dark might be to install WinAmp, if you haven't done so already.