@aloishammer: Thanks for the above pointers. I had already tried some FO3 Nexus mods. However, nothing has so far enabled FO3 to play properly. The Nexus mods got FO3 to start up, the file selected loads, then crashes during load. That's on 2 of the laptops. The 3rd laptop plays FO3 without any mods ... I have no idea why, and cannot spot the differences that might be behind it. Spent hours on troubleshooting FO3. 

-IainB (January 22, 2017, 07:40 PM)

Jiminy Cricket.

Maybe you've already gone through all of this, but: I'm thinking back up your FO3 saved games, uninstall FO3 and every bit of related software (FOSE, etc.), and make a clean sweep of any other Fallout-related config files or the like. Voidtools' Everything is fantastic for this kind of work. Be certain to kill the actual .INI files, in case there are bad settings. In fact, be very careful about editing Gamebryo .INIs in general. 😉

Unfortunately, the Gamebryo engine does periodically cause save file corruption, even if you're not using a single mod. Corrupt save files may just cause strange behavior in the game—but they can cause a crash to desktop, too. 😝 I usually back up TES / Fallout save files once or twice a day.

That's all I can really think of. That, and check a few things, like make sure FO3 runs with Administrator privileges—it might need it; I don't know—and review any GPU driver settings you might have. If you're using an NVIDIA GPU, NVIDIA Inspector is really good for this kind of thing.

Also, like I said, try using FOSE if you haven't already, and try setting the LAA flag.

I appreciate it, but I don't have and don't expect to acquire any skill in AHK scripting, so I can't maintain it on my own.

-aloishammer (January 20, 2017, 06:08 PM)

No skill needed. Save script, add paths, install autohotkey and copy script shortcut to Windows Startup folder. Then the links will be up to date on each boot.

-Nod5 (January 21, 2017, 12:36 PM)

I understand. But I'm considering long-term possibilities: the Steam manifests may change format next month or tomorrow. They might move, vanish, be renamed, split into pieces, or combined with something else. Maybe Steam will start running them through gzip to save storage and transmission costs. Those are just a few very simple examples.

I avoid becoming dependent on tools that I can't be reasonably sure will continue working in the long term—the long term being years.

Again, I gave GameSave Manager as an example; it's theoretically a very simple tool that does a very simple job (and far better than Steam's Cloud Save feature), but it was maintained by one person who had Something happen that meant he couldn't work on it for a couple years. Luckily, I happened to discover it existed after it was clear it had been abandoned. (Temporarily, but no one knew that at the time.)

Again, thanks, but it's not for me. If I can't maintain it myself—and, at present, I can't—I need to be sure that someone else can... and will. 😁

I'm willing to learn PowerShell if it ever gets really mature, but, at the moment, it's just impressing me with the fact that it can be insanely buggy when you need core features to work.

-aloishammer (January 20, 2017, 06:08 PM)

Again, seemingly quite unfair.  I use it, and it, from my perspective of a daily user, is quite stable if you know what you're doing, and use the constructs as they're intended.  Many people want it to be a replacement for bash and such, and that, it's admittedly not.  So when you use it under those assumptions, yes, it might not operate in the way that you'd want it to.  Sort of like using a screwdriver to drive a nail, or a hammer for a screw.

-wraith808 (January 20, 2017, 06:10 PM)

I'm not being intentionally unfair. I'm relating my own experience, just as you did above.

...And my experience is that, when doing very little with PowerShell—with the latest WMF 5.x installed, by the way—on 7SP1 systems in good order, PowerShell [or system components it requires?] in some cases can't even connect to the Internet... which is what's evident in the link I provided. I'm not using a third-party firewall, and there are no Windows Firewall rules preventing it. (Or else Windows Firewall is completely failing to log the fact.) Also, it's the only thing failing... to connect to the Internet, or failing in any other way.

I haven't made even minor alterations to the PowerShell package providers, either; this came up while I was trying to install something from the PowerShell gallery that apparently requires NuGet 2.something.specific installed as one. I've done nothing to the PS environment as a whole, other than occasionally upgrade the revision of WMF installed, using only Microsoft's official installers.

My working theory is that perhaps something went badly wrong over the last couple years when upgrading from WMF 3.x to 4.x to 5.x, but that would be in Microsoft's hands; not mine. I have no way to test this theory, and the failures aren't generating (useful) logs in any place that I can find. It may not be resolved until I wipe and replace my clean 7SP1 installs with clean 10 ones.

Certainly, the only information I can find amounts to "It must be a proxy failure." I don't use one. Nothing is configured to use one. Nothing has gotten misconfigured by a "stray PAC script" to use one.

Finally, I'm not somehow misusing PowerShell in some bash-drunken fashion. I already explained that I'm having trouble getting a three-line script to work reliably. Not "at all"; sometimes, it fails on login. Mostly, it doesn't. There's no reason I can find that it should mostly work, but not always.

If you're going to make assumptions, please make them on the basis that I've administrated both Windows and UNIX systems for about twenty years, both professionally and personally. If I meant to say that I hate Windows, I'd say that. I haven't even said that I hate PowerShell.

Please also don't cherry-pick what I'm saying. I've been writing long-form responses on the assumption you'll grant me the courtesy of reading and replying to them in their entirety.