Fallout 3 on Windows 7.

Thank you for the advice. This solved one conflict...the patch for Marts Mutants and Merc 2 RE: corpse flies was causing the lockup. So things load up and run, but of course there's the matter of textures. Some of them don't work without ArchiveInvalidation, but if I turn it on the game crashes in about 5 seconds after loading up. Turn it off and no crash, but nothing that requires it will quite work either, i.e. no replaced textures. So this is the next bug to fix.

Solutions so far:
use FO3 loader from disc to place FO3 in it's own folder under games, not programs - GO
use FOMM, FOSE, FO3Edit and BOSS to integrate mods - GO
run without corpse flies from Mart's and thus no need for the patch - GO

However = run with ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated - NO GO = CTD

Wishmaster said:

Have you tried enabling it, disabling it, the re-enable it?
Ive had wierd things where this fixed it.

The only other thing I can think of, is double check the path is correct you extracted the new textures too. Especially if it was a manuall install. I know it sounds silly, but something that can be easily overlooked.

I use ArchiveInvalidated myself, but never had such an issue. So Im a bit unsure what to suggest.
Did you put it in the DATA folder?

I did try the on-off-on with AII but it was still a no-go, and it was in the DATA folder...however, it may not have been in the merged patch that FO3Edit created...I will give that a try.

I also tried manually reloading the bugged textures into the data files, but that only worked for one session; when I next powered up they were bugged again. These are the ones the authors say "needs AII to work"

We shall see what the latest experiments reveal.

Having tried the experiment(s) unsuccessfully and done some research, I came across mention of a bug reportedly identified in 2008 when Archive Invalidation Invalidated was applied to Fallout 3. Setting the value from 0 to 1 to allow the new .bsa's to operate would case a crash in Windows for reasons unknown. In 2009 no fix had been found. I'm 99% certain this is the cause of the crash (and the reason FO3 new textures never work; the game crashes and never runs the complete script). So, has anyone found a solution to this bug since then?

Wishmaster said:

One other thought ...

Are you running AI as Admin? I would guess your are, but just a thought.
I know it needs to be to work properly.

I've been using the built-in with FOMM, set to Admin mode. I suppose I could try running it as a separate program in Admin mode.

I gave your suggestion a try but it didn't work. FO3 crashes 7-10 seconds into loading any time the AII.bsa is present in the data directory.

hankelc1974 said:

I gave your suggestion a try but it didn't work. FO3 crashes 7-10 seconds into loading any time the AII.bsa is present in the data directory.

Next experiment: place AII.bsa in DATA manually, and manually reconfigure the Fallout3.cfg file (no .ini file was found, and changes were seen in .cfg if AII pgm used) resulting in .... no crash, but still no acceptance of new texture paths. It seems to have ignored my manual changes. Note that I changed 0 to 1 in AII without the .bsa mentioned later on on files, and nothing changed or crashed, so I think the problem is a conflict with where the .bsa is coming in.

*of note* but perhaps unimportant, when FO3Edit runs, it mentions "11 expected" for "FO3" so perhaps there is other data missing. No idea.

Next experiment - try turning all the .esp's into .esm's vs. repair files.