I recently purchased Starcraft II and was having performance issues in game due to my computer running out of "paged pool memory." I ran the fix found at this link on the Team Liquid forums http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=113433 and it corrected the error for SC2. The next time I booted up Fallout: New Vegas I was no longer crashing to the desktop after a time ranging from 10 to 30 minutes of play. The error causing New Vegas to crash for me was apparently a lack of paged pool memory being allocated by Windows XP. All of my other attempts to fix the crashing issues did not work. My computer was using about 230,000 K of paged pool memory, a heavy portion of which was being used up by anti-virus. I updated my paged pool memory to 368k using the link posted above and have not had a crash playing Fallout: New Vegas since. I hope this helps out some more people playing NV at least on windows XP; it really is a great game when the bugs aren't killing the experience.

System Specs.
Intel Core 2 6700 @ 2.66 GHz
Geforce 8800GTX
4 GB of ram (registers at 2.75 or whatever XP does)
Running windows XP Professional edition.

If its Avira there's the problem it hit around the first week of november, see below but it's nice to have another work around out there.

This is true. Replace Avira with another antivirus and pay attention to background services and applications that's active when you play FONV. It seems FONV doesn't want to share memory with other active processes or applications specially if the application has memory leaks like Avira Antivir PE.

Hi Boss,
Typically you'd want to set a page file size and location manually.
A good size for you would be 2048MB (min.) and 3072MB (max.)
If you have other hard disks (on their own controller) you could move your swapfile there.
For example, I have a 500GB/32MB WD Caviar Black harddisk called PAGEFILE that I use...
The benefit of moving that off your Windows OS harddisk (C:\) is large. Your rig will no longer pause/freeze momentarily whenever it swaps.

That kernel memory paged pool goes back to Win98 days.
The system attempts to write kernel memory to pagefile - even though you might have 2, 3, 4GB memory or more! It's old-school and it wants to page that kernel memory no matter how much unused real memory you have.
There is a reg tweak that causes Windows to not page so much kernel memory, but to use real memory instead. It's called disable_paging_exec.reg
As opposed to buddy's technique there, which gives Windows a larger kernel paging space.
Or, you can concentrate on not running ANYTHING but the game - no AV, no scanners/updaters/messengers etc. which helps, as you've noticed.
It's more or less 3 different ways to accomplish the same goal...
However in a perfect world, Windows would not page kernel memory at all! And as noted, Win7 is very good at actually using the memory you have installed.
But I still love WinXP,
Regards

Hi I'm using Win 7 64 Bit and Avira Antivirus PE and I have no Problems at all with crashing...