However, shortly after installing and playing FONV I starting getting BSODs which would auto reboot my computer. I couldn't play for more than 10 minutes without this happening. This is the first time this has ever happened with any game on my system. Yes, most of the time a BSOD like this would indicate an overheated graphics card, but FONV was the only game that was causing this problem and my graphics card was not overclocked or running hot. Also, FO3 still runs fine. Weird.
Went through the usual fire drill of defragging, updating drivers, tweaking the .ini files, etc., but with no success. Running in windowed mode and turning down my graphics settings also did nothing. I also tried ruling back my Nvidia drivers to earlier versions but that did nothing.
Then I turned off my Audigy 4 card and switched to motherboard sound. Voila! No more BSOD's after several hours of game play. Just to be sure, I tried playing using different versions of Audigy 4 drivers, but all consistently produced BSODs. So it is definitely an issue that the game is having with the Creative hardware.
Anyone out there who has a Creative sound card and is having problems running the game, I recommend that you switch to your motherboard sound to see if that solves the problem.