I can not get out of the casino! I just got my room from Mr. House, I take the elevator down to the casino and try to exit the front door, and total game crash every time. I get the spinning roulette then blank screen with console lock. I turned off auto save, because it corrupted the save file on one of my attempts, tried ducking, tried with weapon drawn/holstered, tried dumping everything and going out naked, nothing seems to work. It freezes and locks the system every time.

I have the game installed on the HD with 19.8G free space.

I just have to say that I am totally frustrated with this game. I had about 20 crashes previous to this one, but I was able to reboot the system and continue on until now. This is the buggiest game I have ever played and I used to be a freakin' game tester. Your Quality Control svcks and the director of that department should be flogged publicly. This will definitely cause me to hesitate before I purchase another one of your games at launch, and wait for feedback before I trust your company enough to actually purchase another game.

i had the same issue,resolved it by not killing the chap in the cowboy hat outside 38's (posted on this site a few days ago),which meant i had to go back to an earlyer gamesave,working ok now but i don't hold my hopes up!

If you have any companions, fire them. Rex works well - tell him to go back to the Kings.

or shoot em and rob all the stuff!

I got the same problem. I only have save games from inside the Lucky 38, I killed the Cowboy guy and my companion Boone is still outside. I got it to work by uninstalling the game from the harddrive and installing it again, but got the same problem 10 minutes later trying to enter The Strip again from Freeside. Tried the same thing that worked last time, but no, game trolls me again....

Just fix you damn game Bethesda/Obsidian!

Well he can't fire his companions because they are not allowed in to Lucky38 so he is stuck in there. I had exactly the same problem on the 360, I had to revert to a previous save and have just avoided the Strip all together for now. I'm a bit worried by all this talk about the cowboy as he is dead in the save game I am using now. I swear, I'll flip out if this doesn't get fixed before I have done everything else in the wasteland.
Come to think of it there is not all that many people left in my wasteland... thanks to the boredom of not being able to continue with the main quest.

Freezing when entering the strip (from lucky 38 or any other hotel, or from freeside). What worked for me is to go to crimson caravan (or find from some other source) and 'old cowboy hat'. Wear it when entering the strip.