Like a lot of you, I suffered some serious crashing issues on launch day. To be fair, when the game was running, it was running silky smooth on fully maxed out graphics settings. The problem I ran in to was the horrible type of BSOD...the kind where the sound locks up, screeching noises blair from the speakers, sending you diving for the power button thinking your pc is serious need of Rad-X.

I ran in to this frequently. I tried the usual...verifying game files through Steam, defragging the game files, all the general Steam and PC troubleshooting you would go through as Step 1.

None of that worked.

Yesterday I read a few posts that mentioned some issues with Steam Community and Steam Cloud. When I got home, I went and disabled Steam Community features from being activated while in game, and I unchecked the Steam Cloud box in the options settings.

Lo and Behold, I played for 6 straight hours without a single hitch, FPS hit, BSOD, game crash, you name it.

I know this won't work for everyone, but I was flat out amazed that I couldn't play for more than 30 minutes without a crash or BSOD the day before, and simply turning off these two features of Steam made the game rock solid, and far more stable than FO3 was for a long time after release.

It is worth a shot for you folks that haven't tried this yet.

this seems to work for me too, 2 hours without a crash now *fingers crossed*

Best of luck here, but 2-6 hours of play isn't a large enough sample to determine if this is a solution.

I disabled Steam Cloud in hopes of it stopping save corruption/loss (and that was no solution)

Thanks for your blessings.

It's been about 5 or 6 hours now, and it has not crashed once. I've used VATS over and over, ALT Tabbed in and out, large combat groups, it seems to be stable now.
Before I would crash every 10 mins or so.

Thanks for the fix OP, really really appreciate it!

I'll give this a try when I get home. I've only had 1 CTD in about 11 hours of playing, but it couldn't hurt. None of my friends are PC gamers anyway.