I become stuck in 3rd person view very often (no more than a few minutes into the game). The camera suddenly zooms out into 3rd person, and when i press F it seems to TRY to get back into 1st-person - it zooms in for a fraction of a second, then zooms out again like something is pulling it back, or as if F had been pressed again.

Not sure, but it seems to happen more after dialogues/fights/pip-boy use...

I've un/re installed, fiddled with graphics settings, assigned a new key, googled for hours, etc

I have the Italian version, patched to 1.7.03 (although THAT wasn't easy to do, with missing xlive.dll error - which i eventually "fixed" with a windows live disabler btw)

I have an Acer laptop 5742 G / 4GB DDR3 / IntelCore i5 / NVIDIA GeForce 540M, everything updated i think...

Answers hugely appreciated as i've been fiddling with this and other Fallout 3 issues for too many nights and i don't want to stick it on a shelf to gather dust !

Acer is known for faulty products and crappy QA, perhaps the problem is the F key itself?

The same problem occurs when i re-assign view change to other keys.

This is somewhat of a long shot here, but do you have a mouse with a scroll wheel? Sometimes the scroll wheel on my mouse gets stuck to the side and forces third person until I fix it, I realize that this likely isn't your problem and has everything to do with my broken scroll wheel, but it might be worth it to look at it. :shrug: