This is a nice examination of one reason for crashes in vanilla NV, but between all the other stuff that's happening--Havok physics and objects records bloating, Actor data bloating, bad meshes, quests getting goofed around and stuck at various stages--I think there might be many reasons why NV could crash.

Also though in my most recent mod of the game it only crashed once in the entire 50 hour run so uh sucks to suck