I just bought the GOTY edition. It always freezes before I can exit the first vault. Quite often that happens in VATS when a hit is played in slow motion, but also totally randomly outside of VATS. I can reproduce it 9 times out of 10 by going into VATS when officer Park rushes out of the door at the exit of the vault, and firing a couple of shots at him.

I've "only" tried:
- different versions of d3d9.dll in the game folder or removing it altogether
- with and without the multi thread limiting tweak in fallout3.ini
- windowed mode and full screen mode
- disabling my secondary screen
- switching to another sound card
- disabling all GOTY data files; I have no other mods

My HW is i7-3770k, Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen3, 16 GB RAM, GTX 560 Ti, Asus Xonar Essence One.

Running Win7-64 and most recent drivers from nVidia as well as all updates from Microsoft. Nothing else crashes.

I'm a software architect myself, and would put a bullet to my brain had I released something of this quality. This is just ridiculous. How can you not make a game that doesn't crash or freeze or explode for half of the people?

Daggerfall was rock solid compared to this.

Unfortunately Fallout 3 wasn't optimised for Windows 7. The only help I can provide is directing you to http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL77ECC4B6194E1685, more specifically his http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tONiXNbwSt0&list=PL77ECC4B6194E1685&index=8 video.

Also, there are some Asus "Utilities" that cause problems with the game. Stop those from loading with Windows and see what happens.