Fallout 3 GOTY crashes on levelling up.

[Black Panther]

Now I know what's causing the crash, and have temporarily solved it. But I know that I'll have to quit the game when I reach level 20 unless I find a good fix for this.

So, I level up, choose which skills to increase and choose the perk. When I click on "Done" the game freezes. I bring up task manager and it's "not responding".

Here's what I did:

Spoiler

First thing I did was put the atimgpu.dll file (I had deleted it to solve the excessive sky HDR flicker which happens when you have 2 gpu's).

When that didn't work, I disabled all mods (I have only 9 and they're only texture mods).

When that didn't work either, I put my "save games" in a safe place, uninstalled the game, ran ccleaner for good measure, and reinstalled the game.

When that didn't work either I started testing each save one by one, which wasn't very productive since although I have 40+ saves not all of them are near to levelling up! But the ones that were crashed as well, even ones which were very early in the game. Currently I'm lvl 9 going on 10, but I tried a game where I was lvl 2 and where I hadn't had any problem levelling then, this time the game froze when I went to lvl 3!!

I tried the console command player.setlevel #
Still the same problem even if I took my first save and tried to get to level 2

After a bit of googling, there were clues that the Expansion Pack of Broken Steel caused this problem. I got various links to 'solutions' on Bethesda's official forum but apparently they deleted all threads older than a year or 2 so I couldn't read anything!

Now I had played the GOTY a couple of years ago and I never had this problem! I wonder why it surfaced this time

Anyway for good measure I disabled all the official Expansion Packs (while still playing vanilla game with no mods) and guess what... I did level up without freezing.

I re-enabled the EP's and my game's like normal.

So now I guess I have to do the same procedure every time I level up.

Now the problem will be much bigger when I get to level 20.
The EP of Broken Steel increases the level cap to 30, without it the level cap is 20.
So I'd be playing, going to level 21 the game will freeze. If I disable Broken Steel there won't be any level 21 to go to since I'd be capped at lvl 20. And I'm unsure if I can disable the EP without breaking the game if I finish Broken Steel before reaching level 21!

[Black Panther]

A sad bump.

I checked all links linking to these problems and all these links were deleted. No fault, this is a 4 year old game... so...

But anyway, any help is welcome.

[Kreij]

Did you read through this, BP?
If so, never mind.