I own the steam version of NV and ever since the update for Dead Money my computer (not my game, my computer) crashes whenever a weapon fires in VATS or a cinematic kill. It gives be the Blue Screen of Death for a fraction of a second before rebooting and I fear what sort of harm that could cause my computer. A noticeable change in-game is that I hear a random clicking, or some faint static, periodically when the game plays normally, which is slightly more jittery than it once was. I've done what I could to remedy the issue: update drivers, reinstall the game, verify the integrity of the game cache, play without mods, etc. to no avail.

Any and all help is extremely appreciated.

-My specs-
-Windows XP Professional
-AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ 1.80 GHz
-3 GB of RAM
-NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS
-CMI8738/C3DX PCI Audio Device

(I'd like to re-emphasize that the game ran fine on this hardware until the update for Dead Money)

That's ok. Take your time.

Based on this & a quickie Google I'd make a wild guess it's your sound device/driver. Perhaps it's time for a new sound device.

I was afraid of that... I figured as much but was hoping that maybe there was a less-expensive fix. The thing that bugs me the most is that this hardware worked fine before and now it doesn't. I hate the idea of spending more money to play a single game when all other games I own work fine.... I guess I wait for a hotfix.

Also, thank you for your input. It is appreciated greatly.

man, just look at this post
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1164716-game-crashes-when-combat-starts/page__view__findpost__p__17292350

I suppose we have similar soundcards installed.

All other games I have work fine on it.

I tried to fix this via setting up larger sound cache in fallout default .ini file. I had set 4086 Kb cache size and 512 Kb fragment size. Through that I was able to shot at least 15 rounds till BSOD. Well, that is more than it was with default 2048 Kb cache, but still it is inacceptable.

I am a software developer. This very bug makes me think strange and sometimes obscene things about FNV developers team. It seems to me, there is a "stack overflow"-like problem.

guys, are you planning to fix it or not? to add some new sound customization options at least?

Well, that's irritating... This is a big problem, I hope we can catch the devs' attentions and hopefully get a fix for this. I don't want my 50$ to have been spent in vain and I still haven't gotten to play Dead Money yet which looks pretty damn interesting not to mention it includes the M1918 BAR, a personal favorite.

I had this problem early on - and I solved it (but I did have a different sound card - creative audigy). It might be a codec problem. I have found FO3 and FONV to be codec sensative. Try Nirsoft's InstalledCodecs utility, This allows you to disable/enable codecs without uninstalling/reinstalling them: try disabling all codecs EXCEPT those from Microsoft, , Fraunhofer, and Spiro. And the cool thing is - you just reenable them if it makes no difference or you want to find the culprit.

try adding bMusicEnabled=0 (or something like this) to "audio" section of FalloutNV.ini (theoretically FNV will run without music though without crashes too - can't guarantee a thing because I've uninstalled FNV)

yesterday there was a bug report on Oblivion bug similar to this one at our team forum.
the OS was WIndows 7 32-bit.
unfortunately we didn't get detailed specs for the hardware.
the solution was setting bMusicEnabled to 0.