The Elder Scrolls Trekker

I recently downloaded updates to several mods. Soon after, Oblivion refused to start (frozen during Loading sequence).

After much tweaking I traced back the issue to three updates:

- Mighty Magick 4.5

- Arcane university revamped 

- Cyrodiil Transportation Network

The issue with MM was resolved with a further update (apparently, I the update I first caught was corrupted when made available on TES source).

Issue with AUR and CTN were resolved by changing the load order. It appears they have to be loaded at the top of the list (soon after the official mods) in order for them to work.

Once again, the Oblivion Mod Manager is your best friend when dealing with multiple, often conflicting mods. 

Gameplay Improvement - Adds life-like behavior to most creatures in Oblivion. Young creatures who will follow their 'mother'. Creatures will hunt and eat foods found in Tamriel that they would in real life. Creatures will 'drink' periodically during the day at nearby bodies of water. Creatures will generally behave in a more realistic fashion.
Ex: Mudcrabs, rats, deer and young creatures will flee on sight from danger. Boar will often be found near bodies of water to 'wallow'.

Note: Discarded for conflicts with Wildlife improvements in MMM. 

Arcane University Revamped

New Lands and Quests - This mod adds and alters a great deal of the Arcane University, making it more mystical, dramatic and more appropriate for a school of Magic.

Note: Discarded because of impact on performance is too high for my machine.

I took some time over the holiday to reinstall the last round of plugins, one set at a time, to try and trace back the source of my performance problems.

Thanks to the Oblivion Mod Manager (OBMM) - http://timeslip.chorrol.com/obmm.html - I traced the issue back to the ArchiveInvalidation.txt file used by many mods to point Oblivion to new locations of already used textures in the game.

Short story - forget updating this file and use OBMM to manage the load order of your mods, review and resolve conflicts.