Personally I have become paranoid of 'inventory overflow crashes' since that required to restart EE from the beginning two times for me last year ;-)
So I try to delete what I don't use anymore. (My black hole traders do that too for example, real handle deletion ... without me knowing what consequences that might have considering the 'weird nature' of handles ;-)
I remember Raze's posts about this (can't find the most helpful one at the moment); from what I understood and remember the problem can't be solved by deleting handles, since they can't be used a second time (the current limit is 64,000), if the problem you had is the same as this one and I don't mix things up:
http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=580336#Post580336 Anyway: it seems crafting and trading necessarily causes problems at a certain point, depending on the amount of items you deal with.
PS:
If I had known Sniper's work before ... or maybe payed more attention ;-)
Well, I spawn a talking bed-roll or a talking coffin for zombies, so hopefully there are at least SOME differences ;-)
Bed-rolls are an evolutionary universal, so I'm sure Sniper wouldn't blame you for similarities
Using a smallint to store IDs in a game with millions of objects ? Yuck ... ;-)
The problem I had was the notorious 'game crashes on zoning' thing, not everyone had that, but I'm a collector and collect everything that can be picked up. (And I also convert stackable iron bars to non-stackable weapons ;-)
DOS is an amazingly stable beast normally (and very resistent to my modding errors too ;-) and when it happened on my first playthrough I thought 'Crashed ? Can happen! Maybe the save has been corrupted', but when it happened in the next playthrough too, I knew something was wrong.
Anyway, my solution back then was to destroy most of the collected stuff with crafting, or convert it to something else via crafting so that it would stack.
When I examined root templates after the patch that supposedly fixed the problem last year, I noticed that they had made a lot of stuff stackable that was not stackable before and increased stack sizes for other stuff. So my assumption was, that there were simply too many different items and some overflow in trader's inventories caused the crashes. Since it only happened on zoning, one time locking out Cyseal, the other time Luculla for me, I can only assume that the stuff I carried around in inventory added to the 'items per zone' which caused the crash. And I am sure I was very far away from 350 hours, even though sometimes I just had the game running in background or in foreground while taking a smoking break ;-) (I had even chosen Cecil's town hall guards and normal civilians to sell the 1 gold junk to in order to prevent traders from crashing, did not help my own 'fixes' ;-) (As far as I remember my first successful playthrough was even before the patch, with my own changes to stack sizes and item destruction in crafting.)
Anyway, since it is so easy to delete handles, I just do it. If done right, can probably do no harm.
('Black hole trading' makes trader's inventories less of a mess if you ever want to buy something, so why not also delete the stuff. Important stuff is not sellable anyway.)
Since the 'handles' I can access in Osiris are no real 'item handles' but more so 'handles of container slots', maybe it's the number of used inventory slots. (Slots in containers and character inventories.)
It would definitely make our lives easier if Larian ever gave us infos ;-)
