Hey guys, any suggestions as to what might be causing this issue would be greatly appreciated!

I can open the in-game menu perfectly, but the moment I hit the "Save" button and try to open up the save menu, my game will freeze up for any amount of time from a second up to a minute, with times pushing toward the latter being far more common. This is making playing the game incredibly frustrating as I'm one for saving every few minutes just in case something funky decides to happen, or a Legendary Glowing Deathclaw decides to show up and feel my pancreas with it's claws. I have noticed that the game takes considerably longer to recover from whatever is happening in areas where there's a lot going on, compared to areas where almost nothing's happening (in which the freezing is hardly an issue.)

This issue was present before I installed any mods, and I have found that installing performance-improving mods has had no effect.

If you need any specs, feel free to ask.

Thanks a lot!

EDIT: I'll post the basics here, as I'm not so great with specs:

Windows 10 Home 64-bit

AMD FX™ - 8350 Eight-Core Processor ~4.0GHz

8192MB RAM

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

I have started to notice the same lately, then again I'm sporting over 100 saves (might be closer to 200) now which the game needs to shuffle through every time it shows the menu. If you are as eager saver as me, maybe try to reduce the amount of save files. Either by deleting the old ones or, as I will do since I'm paranoid with keeping old saves, just move them out of the game saves folder to some other archive location on my disk for safe keeping.

That's not a bad idea! I'll give it a go and edit this post with my results.

I can't stand the thought of having a corrupt file and no saves to be able to fall-back on!

EDIT: I can confirm that moving my older saves to another folder has fixed the issue. Thank you very much for your input! I moved about 880 save files into a backup save folder in the Fallout4 directory. O.o

880!! I know my 150 or so was over 1G

And yeah, I feel you there with the want to be able to backtrack, learned that lesson with oblivion. My own saving habit is to make new hard save every time I start something, be it exploration trip or location raid or building session. Other than that I use Quicksave. It's rather sufficient for the "wanna save before the conversation" or "wanna save before I open that door" or such. That keeps my hard save frequency somewhere about half an hour.

I make a new hard save every few minutes, which is ridiculous, but it helps me to stay calm when things are getting hectic in the game! There's nothing worse than spending lots of time finding stuff and levelling up, and then getting nuked by a raider who just so happens to have a fat man... >.<