i've looked around for awhile and haven't been able to find anyone else reporting this very specific bug: every time i go inside a building, i start hearing the really loud clunking sound characteristic of items being bounced around, etc. i look around and the culprit seems to always be plates of food. the plate is wriggling around under the food, and the food is shifting all over the place. it is really, really distracting, as i can hear really loud hammering and clunking basically anywhere in the building. it's so loud it covers up dialog.

you probably remember this happening in oblivion, but not with every single plate, and not as loudly or continuously.

the clunking is also affected by which direction you're facing. it usually comes from behind and will stop if you face it.

Having the exact same problem. Opening or closing doors seems to aggravate the problem aswell.

You can even get killed by this 'poltergeist bug'.

have you disabled vsync?, disabling vsync causes this it seems as after re enabling it this problem has vanished again for me

Got the same problem. Half of the indoor areas in my game are completely trashed because the physics objects have just thrown themselves absolutely everywhere! Sometimes I open a door into a room and things fly around and actually damage me.

the issue is that the physics of the game go haywire if your machine is pumping out too many fps. i was able to fix the problem by setting my 120hz monitor to 60hz, which in combination with vsync locks the frames to 60. this completely eliminated the clunking sounds, and has been shown to eliminate crazy explosions of items when opening doors, etc. the problem with this is that now i am getting really bad mouse lag with vysnc at 60...it's unplayable. i wonder if this is because vsync is working so hard to smoosh all my frames down to 60.

someone suggested using an FPS limiter to keep the frames at 60 and to perhaps bypass the mouse lag of vsync, but i don't know if there would be a difference. giving it a shot now.

Is there an ini command to enable a native FPS limit or do we need to use the workaround from skyrimnexus?

Here's a few:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1260165-physics-is-affected-by-framerate/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1259677-physics-issue-other-bugs/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1263595-books-wines-apples-are-thrown-from-nowhere-on-me-wtf/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1260072-items-flying-around/

Also related:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1265407-dragon-bones-keep-moving-around/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1264856-dragon-skeletons-flopping-around/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1263173-dragon-skeleton-drops-out-of-the-sky/


That probably worked for you because enabling vsync will also drop your FPS. This bug is drastically affected by frame rate, and becomes far more pronounced the higher your FPS.

yes. physics was the key search term; i had been focusing on the sound as the culprit. seems obvious now.

i wasn't able to work around this issue by using fps limiter. limiting frames instead of using vsync still had screen tearing. so at this point it looks like you have to have either have crazy physics, bad input lag, or screen tearing.