Savegame Crashes, PLEASE HELP!((SPOILER ALERT))

[KaneShade]

I've been a longtime fan of both Fallout 1 and 2, so with the upcoming Fallout 3 hitting shelves this month, I decided to revisit fallout 2, which I've never finished.

I'm pretty far into the game. I've got the GECK and Power Armor, along with tons of other things. I'm running around with 3 NPCs who all have max item weight on them.

The problem is this: In new reno, I've done all the jobs to get the quad made-man accomplishment, and was working towards going through and getting them all. It's not working out too well, since my sneak rating is somewhere around 20%. I ended up killing salvatore and all his men. Afterwards, if I try to save, it crashes to desktop and corrupts the slot I tried to save in.

I have multiple other saved games, so I restored to about an hour before this happened and tried to save just to check it out. It worked fine, and I could save over top of the corrupted save files.

However, once I got to the same point, and killed salvatore and his men again, the same thing happened.

I had read about a possible issue with having too many items in the area, so I left all my NPC mules in south reno while I dealt with Salvatore, and tried again. Still no luck.

I'm playing an unpatched version of the game on windows vista home premium. I've been playing it for around 8-10 hours each day, for about 3-4 days and haven't had any problems with crashing untill now. I do save a LOT, so not being able to save the game at all from this point forward really isn't an option for me.

I'm pretty far into the game, and I think that restarting at this point would be so disheartening that I just wouldn't even want to do it, so I hope it's not a patch issue.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

KaneShade

[Kipi]

Has your skill -button greyd out, unworking? That's usually the first sympton of Too Many Items -bug. Also, when the bug triggers in, the game is automatically corrupted, so leaving your party members behind after that doesn't help.

Best suggestion that I can give right now is that you load the previous working game, and then get rid of all the items not necessary. This can be done by selling the items you are sure you don't need to merchants, just be sure to spread the items to merchats from at least couple of different towns. If after that you still have items that you know you are going to need the deposit them somewhere safe. Usually at that point of game you have cleared at least one place containing several lockers, boxes and/or shelves. Just keep in your inventory (party members' included) and in car's trunk only the items you necessarely need (healing stuff, quest related stuff you are going to need in near future, necessary weapon(s) and ammo to those.

[KaneShade]

Has your skill -button greyd out, unworking? That's usually the first sympton of Too Many Items -bug. Also, when the bug triggers in, the game is automatically corrupted, so leaving your party members behind after that doesn't help.

No, my skill button works fine. The entire game works fine, except when I try to save it. When I try to save, I get a black screen, which lasts a couple minutes before I give it the 3 finger salute(ctrl+alt+del), and windows informs me that the program has stopped working.

I read up some more on the "too many items" bug, and based on what I've read, this doesn't appear to be that.

I've done testing, and like I said, It saves fine from an earlier point, even with my party with me, and all of our items. The game doesn't do this untill I start killing Salvatore's men. But once I get past that point in the game, it won't let me save at all.