Just got NV from Steam and its not working at all. I click play and it acts like its going to load up then screen turns black, freezes and I have to use CTRL+ALT+Delete to cancel. I have no mods and no DLC's running, so nothing in that way is causing problems. I've got a AMD Radeon HD 6700 series Graphics card, a 500gb hard drive, 4gb ram. It can pretty much play any game out there, but for some reason only F3 and FNV cause me problems, at least F3 let me get to the dam main menu. Anyone know why its not wanting to play?

Ok, I think the .ini file is missing. Only the Esm is showing up. Is there a specific name for the .ini file, as I'm not seeing anything with .ini at the end like the esm.

I don't think there's any .ini files in the data directory that holds the .esm files. You should find I think 4 .ini files in the previous directory however (med.ini, high.ini, etc with similar names I don't remember them at the moment).

There should be 2 .ini files here: C:\Users\\Documents\My Games\FalloutNV
1. fallout.ini
2. falloutprefs.ini

The above two .ini files are created by the game when you first start it up (when it says detecting video settings).

have you tried a game cache verify?

1) Open Steam
2) Right click on Fallout: New Vegas
3) Hit Properties
4) Click the "Local Files" tab
5) Click on "Verify Integrity of Game Cache"

There may be one file that fails to verify. Check here : C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\gamevalidation.log (or whereever you installed steam)
The file will open in notepad. It may show installscript.vdf. If it does don't worry about it as it seems to be a common issue.