I bought Fallout New Vegas when it came out, I did even preorder it. But back then I only started it once, created a character but didn't had time to play it at all. So finally I'm on holiday and I thought I can give it a try now. Even purchased two DLCs in the meantime. But now as soon as I try to start a new Game after the loading screen, the game just crashes. It only says FalloutNV.exe stopped working and nothing else (there is no drop-down menu or anything). So it did work like one year ago, but now it doesn't. Probably due to the latest patch I assume. But with Steam I have no way to downgrade my version somehow, do I?

So I tried using the compatibility mode with WinXP SP3, running as Admin, disable Aero and whatever. Still the same thing. I then tried verifying the game cache with Steam - always redownloads one file - which seems to be common. Since nothing worked, I uninstalled the game through Steam, went to My Documents/My Games Folder and deleted the Fallout New Vegas Folder. Redownloaded the game in Steam, updated my ATI Driver to 11.7 (was on 11.6 before), restarted PC multiple times, made sure no funny software is running in the background and BAM, same problem again!

A lot of people seem to be having this problem, but I did not find any solution in all the threads, except for the steps I have already taken. Did I miss anything? My PC runs every other game fine, it's not overclocked, no virus nothing.

So does anyone has any last tips for me? I'm regretting spending money on this game already

edit: God, now the game costs 1/4 of what I paid, still I bought the 3rd DLC in hope that it magically make my game playable....guess what. It didn't help. Like throwing money in a well ever helped at all...

What are your computer specs?

I'm running an Intel Core i7 860 @2.8 Ghz, 8 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 5850 on a MSI Motherboard with Intel P55 Chipset (MSI P55-GD65) with Win7 x64. Harddrive is a 600GB Western Digital Raptor SATA drive. Antivirus Software is only Microsoft Security Essentials, UAC disabled.

Like I said, the original release Version started fine, so it really seems to be a problem with the latest patch. I am not the only one with this problem, there are quite a few threads about this issue. On the same machine I ran Fallout 3 without problems, and every other game (from Crysis 2, to The Witcher 2 even old stuff like Vampire The Masquerade which I'm currently playing, runs fine).

I tried with and without the DLC files, everytime the same problem. After the loading finishes, the game just crashes. I tried to Debug it with Visual Studio JIT Compiler but for some reason that also failed to start.