Not a lot of room for the title, so i hope that is descriptive enough. This is info about why i was having so many issues modding Fallout 3 recently.

I'm a longtime TES mod user, and a few weeks back got Fallout 3 GOTY (on DVD!) and decided to check out the mod scene for it, knowing how awesome both Morrowind and Oblivion were for player made mods.

So two weeks later and i've only just worked out the reason i was having such issues modding Fallout 3. And checking the various mod threads i would see all sorts of end users issues like i was experiencing, just things not working as intended etc.

It had become so confusing that i was just about to pull the plug and do a complete re-install of windows, just to be sure. And then i bumped into one thread out of the many hundreds i had read and an error specific to my security situation came up, so i followed the trail and found 'the answer' to all my issues with modding Fallout 3.

It turns out my firewall/antivirus had recently become very fond of 'auto sandboxing', and when i game i put both into their 'game modes', which does not turn off auto sandboxing.

I had to manually turn of the auto-sandboxing feature to finally get all the mod tools and mods working properly, and going on many of the mod complaints/issues users have i would not be surprised if all these people were also having the auto-sandboxing issue.

So just to share this info in case it is useful for others with inexplicable issues adding mods to Fallout 3 etc.