Is there a way to disable all music in the game - not just mute it, but like the ini setting for Oblivion, disable it completely so that the game doesn't even try to play it? There's something odd about my setup that causes issues with sound in both Oblivion and Fallout 3, and by disabling the music in Oblivion I've been able to avoid the problems that it causes (mainly freezing randomly on music change) but I looked through the ini for Fallout 3 and didn't see a similar setting. I tried adding the line myself, but if that works then I must have added it wrong because it had no effect on the music.

Go into your settings inside the game. (press ESC). You can turn the music off there from the sound options.

Additionally, it doesn't appear that FO3 uses the same ini commands for master audio control that Oblivion does. (OB: bMusicEnabled=1 & bSoundEnabled=1 VS. FO3: bEnableAudio=1)

The only thing I see there are volume sliders, not an option to disable the music entirely.

Yeah, and did you 'try' to move the music slider to the left, to the off position?

I'm not sure you read Kristoffers question right. He did not just want to mute the music, he wanted to turn it off so that it is not loaded by the Fallout 3 engine at all.

If you remember that in Oblivion, muting music did not stop it from being loaded. This was a serious issue for a number of people (myself included) who had sound cards that the Oblivion engine had problems using, causing major drops in framerate (yes, I did use the silent footsteps mod). I do not have the problem on my new computer, so I have no idea if muting the music actually stops it from being loaded, but Kristoffers question suggests that it does not.

Edit: @Kristoffer
Have you tried asking in the hardware section? Might be some more knowledgable people there.

I guess the OP will have to try and report on if it works or not. I figure its like the other sliders, where when they are in the off position, they do not load. For example, when the grass is off, and I turn it on, it takes a second to load the graphics before they are displayed.

The way I figure it, if turning down the music slider to 0 doesn't stop the radio (even though that slider doesn't affect radio volume) then it's not turning off the music, just muting it. I could try it, but it's not a problem that can be reproduced on demand, sometimes it takes a while to cause the issue, and sometimes, it does it as soon as I try to load the save after starting the game.

I'll give it a try, I think my best bet is just starting the game, loading my last save, and see if it freezes right away or crashes when the game loads (two symptoms which I think are related to this issue, though the crashing is much rarer).

EDIT: well, that was quick. Went in, turned down the music volume to 0, then tried to load my last save - and it froze.

A little more testing:
Turned the radio volume to 0: no change
Turned off bUseAudioDebugInformation - no change
Disabled audio: was able to get into the game. Turned off the radio in the pip-boy, quicksaved, and quickloaded repeatedly without any freezing.
Re-enabled audio, loaded the save with the radio off, quickloaded repeatedly with no issues. I even quickloaded much more rapidly than in the no-audio test.

Hopefully this means I can have sound as long as I turn the music off in the audio settings and the radio off in the pip-boy.

I thought Quick-loading and Quick-saving was bugged and is a major cause for game save corruption.
I have always been told that you should only use 'real' saves. And in my experience, loading a game 'after' you have been playing will CTD.

I haven't experienced any savegame corruption and I use quicksaves all the time.