JudasIscariot: I know this may be a pain in the fundament, so to speak, but try running the game pure vanilla. No high res patch no FALCHE or anything and see if that works for you. I would hate to have you go through all that and still have no fix for your problem. And make sure to set Fallout.exe to run in Administrator mode in the compatibility menu. Let me know how it all works out for you.
I finally got past the Set dialogue part by mostly avoiding the situation, but then went back to another town, only to find that it still froze when transitioning areas of the town. It has to be a corrupt file somewhere in the install, because I even moved the game to a different drive with the same results, and also tried the suggestions you made, except for reverting the patches altogether...
At this point, I guess I'm going for a fresh reinstall, and hoping my save game data I backed up will not contain any of the problems I had already. If so, guess it's back to the start again altogether...
Disappointing and a little frustrating, but on the good side, at least I know what I'm doing from the start a little better if I have to restart from the beginning.
Thanks again for all of the help, Judas!