This is really frustrating. Fallout 3 had an unusually bad crash (CTD, black screened and froze my computer for 2 minutes). I restarted my computer, and when I booted up Fallout 3 again, the main title music was gone (the music that plays at Continue, Load, New, etc.). I didn't really worry about it, but now, after playing for 5-10 minutes, my mouse and keyboard freeze up. NPCs still walk around, everything seems fine, except the game doesn't respond to any inputs (I can alt-tab out and in, which does nothing). The reason I mention the absent start menu music is because I found a solution to this problem. It seems that people that have installed music mods (i.e. adding songs to the radio) have this problem. They remove the mod and all associated MP3s, and suddenly their game stops locking up.

However, I have not installed a single music mod, but can't help but think that the missing title music might be the culprit. The file is in my music folder, and it is not corrupted (I can play it, no issues). I have already tried re-installing, disabling all mods/DLCs, but just can't get the title music to play and then, consequently, the game to stop "freezing" my controls.

Does anyone have any insight on this problem (perhaps getting the music to run again)? As I said, I've been playing the game for over a week with no problems, until today when the crash happened.

Specs:

Manufacturer:
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Processor:
AMD Athlon™ II X2 240 Processor (2 CPUs), OC'd @ 3.2 GHz.
Memory:
4096MB DDR2 Kingston RAM
Hard Drive:
242 GB
Video Card:
ATI Radeon HD 5750

EDIT: It appears there is no radio music either. Three Dog will say "Here's some music," and then it goes silent. Same with Enclave. When I die, the death music still plays, though.

Hi, I'm guessing you're on Windows Vista/7 AMD64 (x64), because I've encountered the same thing on my end.
The keyboard and mouse tend to lock up after several minutes, almost reliably.

I repaired the problem, kind of. I unregistered (more like renamed) the DLL quartz.dll from C:\Windows\SysWOW64.
Aaaand I never had an interface problem again, but removing this DLL killed my game's ability to playback MP3s, which is what is happening to you (I think radio vocalizations are .OGGs, that's why they still play)
Quartz is DirectShow stuff, apparently.

I didn't get this on my last Windows 7 Fallout 3 installation. Preserved my Fallout.ini, mods, generally everything except R.A.C.E., an extra radio channel mod.
Notably, I'm just reusing old savegames from the last installation, so I'm going to try disabling R.A.C.E. after reloading it.

So I sense a very very very related issue. And very interestingly, the death music plays, probably because it doesn't play the MP3 in the Data/Music folder directly (I've tried to replace it with another track, with no effect, previously).



Weird. Let's hope something positive comes of this, I'll keep looking.

To expound:

I have tried installing K-Lite and CCCP codec packs to no avail.

Suspiciously, my menu music plays but no combat/ambient MP3s.

And I notice continuous GFWL (or just xlive.dll, pretty much) error reports on my Event Viewer. This might be FOSE denying xlive, but these are new errors against my old Win7 build.

- System   - Provider    [ Name]  XLive    - EventID 2    [ Qualifiers]  32768     Level 3     Task 0     Keywords 0x80000000000000    - TimeCreated    [ SystemTime]  2011-01-08T20:28:58.000000000Z     EventRecordID 2127     Channel Application     Computer KAP-Anzu     Security  - EventData    Fallout3.exe    1.7.0.3    3.4.0018.0 (WGX_XLIVE_V3.04_RTM.101014-0105) C:\Windows\system32\xlive.dll    0x80004005 Games for Windows - LIVE DLL 

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hey i'm with the same problem, firt i has the crash to desktop then i disabled all my audio and video codecs so i had no musics and no more crashes but my controls are freezing now. i deativated all codecs with mention of quartz and activated the others but the crashes came back.
If someone have a tip of what kind/name/wathever codec have issues with fallout 3 it could help.