Looking for help with crashing / mod conflicts

[Nicasen]

Hey all, I've been crashing fairly frequently (every 30 - 60 minutes) and I'm really lost as to what has been causing the problem. Even using the master update and making merged patches I'm still getting frequent crashes even though I'm only using a handful of mods. Here are the mods that I'm using:

 

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e365/Eggwoll/EspOrder.png

 

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e365/Eggwoll/EsmOrder.png

 

I've tried playing around with the load order for hours and have tried giving all the big mods priority (MoMod, Shrapnel, etc) but again, it still crashes (the load orders in the screen shots are just examples of load orders I've tried). I haven't been able to pinpoint which mod is causing the problem yet and I've tried to deactivate them one by one to see when it stops, but it's extremely monotonous and I don't want to spend more time looking for the bug than actually playing the game. If anyone knows what the likely source of conflict is or if any of the mods don't play nice with the latest patched version of New Vegas (I tried to sift through all the discussion pages to look for problems but didn't find any except for IWS which I removed, but even after making a new game the crashes still happen).

[Nicasen]

Also forgot to mention that I can't really save my game settings. Every time I load up the game I have to change the difficulty back to Normal since it always loads the game on Very Hard. I already know this is because the My Games folder somehow got changed to read only, and I can't remove read only status since whenever I do try to remove it and hit apply it doesn't stick (it says it's removed, but when I recheck the properties it still says it's read only status). Not sure if this is somehow related to the crash but I figure I would mention it.

[luthienanarion]

Never use Master Update in FNV. That function was created to solve a specific problem with one of the FO3 patches, and does more harm than good in FNV.