I discovered a nasty surprise when I went to play Oblivion to check on a reference in game today. I haven’t opened the thing up in a couple years, since before we installed the new graphics card actually. I was sort of curious how it was running now that it was an old game and no longer the Horker of resources that it was when it came out (and for some years after.)

Welp, it came back with that time worn old error “Couldn’t inject dll!”

This error has all sorts of causes, from Vista, to UAC, to firewall settings, to administrator access. With some fuddling around including turning off my firewall and making sure my exes were running as administrator, which really shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place since it ran while under the Vista dynasty and I’d installed it in the no-no zone of \Program Files, I discovered it was the antivirus. Well, that wasn’t all that surprising… the surprise came later.

Good old Avast Free has been keeping my computer (somewhat) secure for a while now. It does a good job usually at letting me know what it’s doing and why it thinks x program is misbehaving. It shouldn’t have been an issue including Oblivion into the exclusions, right? Wrong. Right now, I have all the files in the freaking folder set into the exclusions. The only thing that keeps Avast from stopping the dll injection is going into Behavior Shield options and unchecking “Scan for malware like behavior.” Nothing else works for me so far, including doing the unthinkable “allow always” option. The strange thing is, SKSE on Skyrim works just fine in the non-default folder I set it to. I haven’t fully checked into why, possibly because it is that Oblivion is installed in the default Program Files, but after all the work I did to install FCOM, MMM and OOO on Oblivion, there’s no way I’m uninstalling now to check. At least I know what to turn off when I want to play Oblivion these days.

Sure, Oblivion’s an old game, but one I think is still lasting, and the more info to deal with these things as we move away from old software, the better.