In light of the upcoming Fallout 4, I decided to replay both Fallout 3 & New Vegas. Fallout 3 went just fine, but I've encountered a lot of serious problems with New Vegas that never occurred in any of my previous playthroughs (I've done several).

The reason I'm writing this is to see if anyone knows of any fixes for these bugs, and/or to warn potential players of them---

So first I got ED-E, who is perhaps most useful for his carrying capacity. I managed to get a lot of nice weapons; a Tri-Beam laser rifle, a Plasma Caster etc. (super rare stuff), and I gave these to ED-E while I wasn't using them. So when I went to Gomorrah, I spent some time there, came back out into the wasteland and soon after realized that all of the weapons in ED-E's inventory were gone. Virtually all of my valuables had just dissolved. Upon assuming it was caused by the Gomorrah weapons exchange, I repeated the process and pinpointed it as the cause. Apparently this can happen with all companions, because Arcade Gannon lost my Hunting Rifle at the Silver Rush. The funny thing is, from what I recall, this error DID NOT occur at launch... so I googled it and found that evidently this error occurs as a result of the most recent patch. What a backfire. This is insanely broken, and given how old the game is, it's safe to say it will never be fixed. With foresight, you can work around this, but jeez what an insanely unacceptable bug.

But that's not all, the real game-breaking nugget is that the Strip literally will not load. I've gained entrance via the credit check before and it worked just fine, but now I'm 20-ish hours in and I cannot enter the Strip. Of all the places to cease functioning, the Strip is the most heavily involved with every main quest path... how in the world could they let this slip by? Every other area loads fine. I can't contact the NCR embassy, I can't reach Mr. House, I can't access any of the main casinos, therefore I can't complete the game. This is the very definition of a broken game. Anyways, does anyone know a way to make the strip load? The NCR monorail sometimes works, but that's not exactly easy to access under all conditions. That's not something that the player should have to do, or even be expected to know how to do in order to complete the game. I'd like to fix the Freeside entrance, as opposed to using the NCR route every time.