BUG in Quest: By His Bootstraps? Faction reputation loss?

[Lifeonerth]

Every time I tried to complete the quest By His Bootstraps, Jameson is dead when I show up.  I have reloaded and tried several times and he is always dead.  I read on a forum that this may be tied to using the computer terminal to unlock the door before going upstairs, so I tried it without using the terminal and he was still dead.  When I turned the quest in, I had a reputation loss with Auntie Cleo.  

This seems like a bug.  This quest was given at the last minute by the quest giver as if an afterthought.  That, to me, does not signal high priority.  Because of this, I ended up doing this one after a few others, just because I ended up in that area later.  Quests in these kinds of games are not usually *actually* tied to time, or if that is a factor it seems to typically be made pretty explicit upfront because we are not expecting it in an RPG.  Besides, it is certainly not the fault of the strange space captain and crew, who show up in town voluntarily to risk our lives rescuing everybody, that this guy got eaten by dangerous monsters, which the quest giver was responsible for importing to this planet in order to torture them (even if inadvertently) and experiment on them.  

It seems that other people are having the same experience.  I could not find anything online about how to do the quest in a way that does not involve Jameson dying.  Either way, even if we fail to save him, it does not seem reasonable to give us negative reputation with the faction.  Ok, reduce or take away the faction reputation increase if you need to, although really we still all risked our lives to go try to save this guy and kill all the raptidons and bring back news to his boss.  If it were me, I would at least appreciate the effort.  

Please let me know if there is a way to make this work and please consider taking a second look at how this one plays out.  I put so many hours into the gameplay here and I can only do it over so many times before it isn’t fun anymore.  I am a completionist but I really don’t want to redo the whole Roseway section.  I really appreciate any help you can give, and thank you so much for making a great game for us!  I have always thought New Vegas was the best of the Fallout series.