Okaaay... I'm having uno problemo trying to open up the fallout3.esm file on startup. I get to about 33% loaded and then BOOM. It crashes. This a problem seen before? I'm on Vista, downloaded the patch, uninstalled and reinstalled everything, I have no mods and I have a pretty decent PC.

The geck will freeze when loading for almost everyone. For me, I get to usually either ~30%, or 40% and it freezes. Just wait, (say Wait for program to respond) and after about 5 minutes it will unfreeze and you can use it. It just takes a very long time to load all the stuff, and it likes to freeze when it does that. So just wait and it should work just fine.

You two might try some computer optimization or virus/trojan/malware removers because I can load FO3.esm in 20-25 seconds (depending on what else I have opened, which is usually 3DSMax, an animation based program that I created to do some automatic stuff to anims I export, usually 2-3 instances of NifSkope and at times GIMP) no hang up or stalls nothing just loads 0-100% straight through.

I don't know if that would help. 5 minutes may have been a bit of an exageration for me. It is more like 20-30 seconds. But as far as I have heard in the last 2 years, about 80-90% of users experience the geck freeze while loading, and when exiting. Its just an odd bug that only happens to most people, but not all for some reason.

When I load the Geck, the percentage of the load is displayed in the status bar (the very bottom of the Geck), and it cycles constantly, never stopping for more than a fraction of a second until it is completely loaded.

@OP - Did you patch your Geck to version 1.5?