CTD on game start of a fresh install

[OH1972]

I just downloaded Oblivion freshly from Steam and installed it. The launcher works just fine, but when I hit "Play", the game crashes. Now Oblivion has run on this machine just fine in the past, in fact, there's a CD/DVD install elsewhere on the PC which has been modded to death - which is why I got me a steam version now. Now the crashing version at issue here is obviously as vanilla as can be - no mods whatsoever installed, just DLC. 

 

Sometimes the game just restarts the launcher, sometimes it actually starts the game and I get as far as the first frames of the Bethesda logo, but it crashes reproducibly. There's plenty of RAM free, so I'm at a loss what might cause this.

 

Nevermind, after a few attempts, it suddenly decided to work....