I've recently started playing New Vegas again, and much to my surprise, it was running very stable. Some stuttering here and there, a crash every 5-6 hours, but nothing too big. After about 40 hours of play I get to the area around Bitter Springs, cautiously looking out for Cazadores. Not being a stealth specialist, I fail and attempt to fight them off. Cazadores being, well, Cazadores I die. I reload, ready to try again, and then the games crashes. So I restart the game to see what was wrong, and when I load that save, the game crashes again. I try for a third time, loading a previous save, and the game works again. I hurry off to kill the Cazadores, this time succeeding with a combination of mines and Ratslayer-ing. I enter the Counterfeit Cap Shack to loot the place, and when I step outside, lo and behold, it crashes again. I decide to take a break.
Coming back, I decide it isn't worth it and travel West along the northern part of the map. It runs perfectly smoothly, and then I spot another Cazador hot area. Using the same tactics as last time, I kill the cazadores and enter the Brewer's Beer Bootlegging shack, looting the place. All is well, until again I step outside to the Mojave and the game crashes. I'm fairly annoyed at this point, but not ready to give up, so I reload a save outside the trouble area and exterminate the bugs again. This time I leave the area and save. I loaded that save without the game crashing, only for it to crash later when I went back to the area with the dead Cazadores.
So far no other creature has done this, and even a clean save with nothing except the DLC installed the problem persisted.
I was wondering if this has happened to anyone else, and if so, is there a fix? I'm not going to entirely reset my game just because of some bug bug, but this does make Bitter Springs and various shack with skill books in them inaccessible.