I believe I may have found a reasonable fix for a few Fallout 3 crash to desktop issues. I put the solution at the bottom in case you don't feel like reading the whole thing. I started playing Fallout 3 again yesterday after putting playing on hiatus about 2 months ago. The game ran without incident, and I hadn't made any major changes to my OS, other than video card drivers. Last week, I had updated my video card drivers to Nvidia's 258.96 WHQL to make another game run correctly. I started up Fallout 3 version 1.7 with Pitt/Steel/Anchorage loaded, and decided it was time to start a new game from scratch. The game didn't crash up until I left the vault. I made it to megaton, did a few things, then headed out into the wasteland. I couldn't travel very far until the game crashed. I reloaded my autosave, and it crashed again in just a few minutes time. What went wrong? The game ran just fine months ago.... until I loaded new video card drivers. I tried everything. FFDShow was already fixed. I turned off everything threaded in fallout.ini. I ran the game in windowed mode. I ran the windows live disabler program. I turned off my paging file. After making all sorts of changes, I would run the game for a few minutes and it would crash to desktop in a matter of minutes. It seemed that no matter what I did, the game would always crash. I was about to go through the process of re-installing the entire game, re-patching it, and re-loading windows live, when I thought I'd try doing something else for a change: ______________Skip to the solution________________ Long story short, I deleted my old falloutprefs.ini and fallout.ini, put the DVD in, let it detect the graphics settings, and restore the game's default configuration. I was able to play the game for an hour straight, even after modifying some of the graphics settings. It worked in full-screen, windowed mode, any resolution. I have been playing it nonstop since this morning and have not seen a crash yet. Fallout.ini and falloutprefs.ini are located in "C:\Documents and Settings\*username\My Documents\My Games\Fallout3" Or, just do a windows search, and delete them. Hope this helps
