Red Exclamation Marks in Fallout 3 (No Mods!)

Solution 1:

I know this sounds odd, but try uninstalling it, and cleaning your registry with a program like CC Cleaner. Go through your computer and manually delete anything FO3 related, including the folder for it in 'My Documents'. Check the install folder after you remove it from Steam, and manually delete what is left in there as well. After reinstalling, load the game with no DLC checked, make a character, play through up until Megaton or so, then save. Reboot your game, check all of the DLC and load the game back up.

Solution 2:

I figured it out. After playing with the load order to no avail, I browsed through the steam FO3 folder for any ini files I could try to tweak. I was wondering why there is a fallout3.exe as well as a fallout3ng.exe. When I run the ng file everything was working fine. Looks like the launcher that came with steam runs the fallout3 file while the fallout3ng file is the more recent (file version 1.7.0.3 vs. 1.0.0.15).

So when renaming the ng-file (and two extra files fallout3ng.exe.[cfg|cat]) to fallout3.exe everything works great. All exclamation marks vanished (springvale, germantown, baileys crossing).