I'm on
3200+ Amd 64
2 gigs of ram
7800gs
windows xp sp2
and ...
Oblivion will run fine for a minute and then it will have about a 5 second pause, and then run fine again for another minute. Very annoying. I'm emulating it on Power ISO (yes I have a legal copy, yes I hate having cds in the drive) if this can point some direction into what's going on. I also only have about 20 gigs left on my 300gig drive so if low disk space plays into it then I'll change that as well.
Doesn't matter what settings I'm on either - 800x600 versus 1280x1024.