Inventory Crash in Fallout New Vegas

Just picked this game up from the Steam sale, and I'm running into this crash.

I can't assign any weapons to the shortcut keys since when I hit any number while in my inventory, my game immediately crashes.

Does anyone know of a fix for this?

I have a theory rather than an answer: it is plausible the graphic asset(s) or user interface configuration file(s) used for rendering the radial menu that appears when you press and hold a number key were corrupted during install.

Have steam verify the game files by right-clicking the game in the library and choosing "properties".

Also, disable any mods you may have installed.

After running into this bug a second time, and trying out what horatio suggested in his comments, I found the problem.

Apparently I somehow picked up a stick of dynamite that had a durability of 0, yet this is stacking with my existing dynamite stack. This causes New Vegas to crash repeatedly when it is in the shortcut menu, or if you try to throw one.

Dumping it into a storage container fixed the issue.