Hi everyone,
just thought I'd share my workaround to a very strange and intermittent problem I was having getting the game to launch.
I recently purchased Fallout 3 GOTY off steam and installed it. played the first time without a hitch and was in game until you leave vault 101 without issue. I saved, with the full intention of resuming the following evening.
The next time I tried to launch the game (from shortcut, steam or game library tab within steam) I got the error "fallout 3 launcher has stopped working" and in the background the shape of the launcher and picture came up, but none of the text for play, options, etc. sometimes the text
would show up, but fail and not be able to click any of it to proceed past the launcher into the game.
I rebooted (the universal first step to "fixing" any windows problem), and it worked again. the next night, it failed again. and again. then it worked (so I played for a bit), then quit and tried to relaunch with a fail.
as near as I could figure it, once it made the ini file in my games\ fallout 3 folder, it couldn't process it for some reason. delete that ini, it goes through the "fallout 3 will now detect your video settings" song and dance again and then the game will launch... that time. exit and relaunch and the error returns.
I read through almost all of this and many other threads and found a lot of people were fixing their problem of crashing while in game by running in xp or vista mode. I have had no issues while in game (so far, knock on wood), but clicking the "more information" button when you get the stopped working error told me the fault was in the launcher itself.
I set the launcher to run in XP SP3 mode and so far I've got it to come up without fail over a dozen times. the only problem is that win7 now asks every time I launch the game "do I want this program to make changes to my computer". a little annoying, but not the end of the world.
I tried the windows basic mode suggested above, as well as many other suggestions in all that I read and this is the only thing that (seems to have) worked for me.
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OS

Windows 7 Professional x64 CPU

AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition 3.2 GHz Motherboard

Asus Crosshair III Memory

Corsair 4GB XMS3-1333 DHX Graphics Card(s)

2x XFX Radeon HD 4870 1GB Sound Card

SupremeFX X-Fi onboard sound Monitor(s) Displays

Samsung 205BW Screen Resolution

1680 x 1050 Hard Drives

many PSU

Corsair 850w Case

Antec Nine hundred Gamer Cooling

standard + Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2 CPU Cooler Keyboard

Microsoft Reclusa Mouse

Logitech MX 518 Gaming-Grade Optical Mouse