I beat Fallout 3 GOTY edition yesterday, after purchasing it on steam two days earlier, fantastic game. I didn't know completing the main story would prevent me from continuing to explore, so I beat the game and tried loading back to a save a few quests before. From the load screen, I only had 7 available save states. The most recent three were autosaves that wouldn't let me go back or fast travel away or leave the memorial. The next oldest one was me at level 4 (I was 15 at beating the game). I had saved dozens of times using F5 and there were many many other autosaves. Whenever I loaded the game and hit continue it would always pick me up where I left off. I had never signed in to LIVE (i read that saves were stored in different locations depending on being LIVE or not). Where did all of my other auto and manual saves go? In cmd i typed "dir *.fos /s" and those were still the only saves that showed up, indicating there were no other fallout save files on my drive.

your best bet is to start over and explore the wasteland before completeing any quests. thats how im doing it on this run. i just run around and grab every explore point and pick up quests and maybe complete one or two but i avoid the dad stuff, i have completed zeta and raven rock and the GNR stuff without issue.

Yeah I guess thats what im gonna do. I played the good character the first time around, maybe i'll play evil this time.