eternalrecluse

Cheers for the suggestions, unfortunately nothing doing. I reformatted my HD last night and reinstalled everything, and now things seem to work again. Utterly bizarre. Only thing I did differently was not to install the patch, which I realised I didn't need as the GotY edition is already 1.7. Maybe that was affecting it? Anyway, 3-4 hours play now and not a single CTD, so fingers crossed this holds out. I'll be managing my save files a lot better this time!

Update - doesn't seem to be the saves. I downloaded a handful of save files from the Nexus and all of them exhibit the same problem, CTD after 5-10 seconds. How irritating! I'll try a full reformat this weekend and see if that solves it....

Hmm interesting, I guess that's a possibility. Next time I get round to doing a clean format I'll start from scratch and manage my saves a bit more carefully, see if that helps...

Unfortunately, that option was thrown out the window when I was bit overzealous in deleting the extra saves to see if that would help! And since I didn't really get this problem till several hours into the game I didn't think starting afresh would be worth it. Any chance it could just be a corrupted save?

Hi folks, so I'm sure you're probably bored of this story by now, but I'm out of ideas. Having installed Fallout 3 GotY edition and been playing for a while with only occasional crashes, I've finally reached a point in the game (Wilhelm's Wharf, after coming through Grayditch having killed off the ants) where the game CTDs after 5-6 seconds. I don't even have to do anything, just load the save and it crashes there and then. Nothing changed with my system during the course of this, and my system is more than sufficient (or at least it should be): AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600 NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 170GB free HDD space 4GB Ram Windows Vista Ultimate I've tried a whole load of fixes, in an order I can't remember: - Installed 1.7 patch - Disabled G4WL - Uninstalled .NET framework 3.5 - Reinstalled .NET 3.0 and Visual C++ - Adjust .ini to allow for dual-core processor - Disabled Vsync in the .ini and on Nvidia control panel - Adjusted GPU fan speed to prevent overheating - Ran the game in windowed mode and with highly reduced graphical settings - Reinstalled to C:\Games - Updated BIOS - Added to ffdshow exceptions - Disabled all codecs - Deleted all extraneous savegame files - Reset controls to default - Turned off all autosaving - Tried four different sets of Nvidia drivers from 175.xx through the latest (190.xx ?) - Disabled Vista Aero - Disabled second monitor - Ran game with compatibility set to Windows 2000 Did I miss anything? Or am I just out of luck? At the moment it looks like the game is going on the shelf till I get round to buying a new machine. Seriously, any ideas would be greatly appreciated in case I've missed something. Thanks guys.