I am having a very weird issue which I haven't ever had with this game before when I played through it twice already.. Today I found the unique weapon pushy in the ruby hill mine and since then whenever I tried to assign the weapon to number 3 (Ive had spiked knuckles on it if it matters) the game crashed. At first I thought it may be related to the new weapon but the game is now crashing when I try to assign any weapon to any hotkey.

This never happened until I reached the ruby hill mine, up until then I had assigned weapons to slots and switched them around n number of times and ofc had done so in previous playthroughs as well. I have no idea what could be causing this, can any one please tell me whats going on or what I could do to solve this other than re downloading the entire game again..

I am on a winxp system which barely satisfies the recommended system requirements but other than the occasional crash at some random event (normal for NV I suppose) which have not repeated themselves, I have never had any issues with the game..

Drop all your weapons (well, everything you are carrying) on the ground. Then pick them back up. The hotkey system should stop crashing at that point.