Hello,

I purchased Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition a couple days ago. I installed the game and it's expansion disk without any trouble. The game runs decently without any slowdown or stutters, except:

Every couple minutes the screen freezes and I can't do anything. The ambient sounds continue to play. After 20-30 seconds, it "unfreezes" and gameplay resumes. It doesn't appear that any time in game has passed as NPCs in mid-sentence just continue where they left off. Then it happens again within a couple minutes. My computer responds immediately to Ctrl+alt+delete and I can shut down the process quickly.

I have an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS video card.
2.6ghz dual core processor
2gb RAM
Windows Vista 32-bit

If you require any more information, please let me know and I'll be happy to provide it.

I think I've nailed down the problem. I've been in communication with tech support without much to show for it but...

The freezing starts when I first recieve the PIP-boy. I disabled the "Vault 101 PA System" radio station and that stopped the problem. The problem occured again during the 'escape the vault' phase. I'm guessing the freezes are happening due to the background sound/music starting up; when the game unfreezes, the background music instrumental is just starting up.

Does this ring any bells? Currently waiting on gamesas to respond to my latest email, figured I'd post it here too.

Tough crowd here, I guess. I'm still waiting on a response from Bethesda, but I've figured out a temporary workaround. My Realtek onboard sound does not like the music of this game (as evidenced by the game running flawlessly when I disable my sound card). I went into the Fallout 3 folder and renamed the 'Music' subfolder to 'Music1' (to stop the game from finding the mp3s). While the game has no background music, the gameplay is perfect and has full sound effects.

Hope this helps someone else too.