Not having the option of choosing what version you want to run for your steam software, that's really not a particularly good idea. They should fix that. Quite often an update will screw something up while fixing something else, and there is the whole mod thing to consider.
Anyway I played through Dead Money, not a single CTD this time, I guess all the stars aligned or something. After my head exploded the millionth time the whole slave colar/invisible death zones thing did start to feel very contrived. Also I found it rather interesting that my companion
Overall the feel was right though, I dunno if it was worth 10E, but I never felt disappointed in the quality.