Fallout 3 on Windows 7.

These are the steps I took to get it working in the default folder location. x64 Version.


Right Clicked on the Fallout3 folder in C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\My Games\Fallout3 and selected properties>security>edit>add then typed in users and gave both my user name and users all permissions.

You really only need to give permission to the Fallout3 Folder itself. Any files and sub-folders should have the same permission properties.




Even though I have allowed my username and users full access, the read only box remains ticked, yet it's still got access.



Fallout3.exe also needs to be "Run as Admin" in the compatibility tab.

Chuki said:

thats just worked for me, when I was stuck in a launcher loop.

Another thing is check to make sure permissions are set correct. Give the My Games and Fallout 3 full read write permissions to Everyone. Beyond that I have no clue.

Hmm - weirder and weirder. But this may make sense as to why I have no issues with Fallout 3 - I installed it to a different drive - where the Program Files folder was not restricted - so my permissions may in fact have saved me - but I do this with all my games....

smarteyeball said:

Chuki, your a champ :) It was a permission problem. It would hang at the point where it would've been writing to the save game. No write access=hang.

I took ownership of the C:\Users\*YOURNAME*\Documents\My Games\Fallout3 folder and gave my username full read/write privileges. I Started a new game and it was past the hang. Save games from Vista work too :)


It's a similar issue to the Vista / S.T.A.L.K.E.R save game problem that occured in one of the patches. The game kept crashing because of write permissions.

I did not have to do that at all....

But, I have my special folders moved, and I also installed the game itself to the D drive where those folders reside....

Chuki said:

Well trying to fix this issue I did reformat and start anew, only to have the problem surface all over again.

My Documents and stuff are all organized similarly on a separate hard drive.

I have

D:\Documents
D:\Pictures
D:\Music
D:\Videos
you get the point.

I change Win7's documents, pictures, etc... location to point to these folders. This automatically updates the library to point here, since the library by default includes C:\users\username\documents, so I just changed the location of that folder.

I do have both versions of win7 installed, and in Win7 64 I didn't have any problems, but in Win7 32 I did. So I knew it had to be something with the 32bit version, I still couldn't figure it out so I reformatted, upon reformat I could get the game launch but I was greeted by a black screen with audio looping, behind that was an invisable error saying the app had crashed.

I'd relaunch into 64bit and again it worked fine, this is when I started checking file permissions. I simply logged back into 32bit, and set the security tab permissions for the "Everybody" group to full control. I checked each individual file in the My Games/Fallout 3 directory since then I haven't had any issues in 32 or 64bit.

Your setup almost mirrors mine- been doing that since Vista after I found out dejectedly that I could not make the installer create those special folders in alternate partitions / drives like XP installer could....

smarteyeball said:

These are the steps I took to get it working in the default folder location. x64 Version.


Right Clicked on the Fallout3 folder in C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\My Games\Fallout3 and selected properties>security>edit>add then typed in users and gave both my user name and users all permissions.

You really only need to give permission to the Fallout3 Folder itself. Any files and sub-folders should have the same permission properties.




Even though I have allowed my username and users full access, the read only box remains ticked, yet it's still got access.




I doubt it makes a difference, but I also run fallout3.exe and falloutlauncer.exe as "Run as Admin" in the compatibility tab.

Again, maybe it is because I did not install it to the C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (X86) directories....

Hmmm.

I left the Users folders on my C Drive, but just change the installation path from C:\... to D:\..., leaving all of the rest the same.

My Documents, Downloads, etc (all special folders) are all on D, but the rest of the user folders are all on C - so only thing I can think of is that the permissions were screwed in your case because of the 2 different OSs sharing the drive....

Have you installed the Games For Windows Live update, that might help as it worked for GTA4.