That is true, unfortunately.
Also, to contribute to the rage:
Fallout 3 appears to be unplayable in my current save. I went as far as to go back to an earlier point (but not much earlier) to see if replaying it would help, and nothing.
What happens is that when your escaping project purity after the enclave take over, I can get into the tunnel perfectly fine. I tell the scientists to wait, and let me scout. I go into the room with the numerous enclave soldiers, and kill them. After killing the final soldier, the game freezes (with the experience indicator still on the screen).
It's not a crash to desktop, but an out and out freeze, looping a small sample of whatever background music was playing at the time (though other samples, such as speech, sound effects, etc. aren't looped).
I tried earlier to do this, and got as far as getting past that locked door (I couldn't hack the terminal myself though, Dr. Li did it) and moved into the open area there. I proceeded to get close to the bend, where we were attacked by 2 feral ghouls and a reaver. And the game froze. When I loaded the closest autosave (it was after getting past the room with the enclave) it would freeze just as Dr. Li was saying something. I didn't even have a chance to walk an inch before it would freeze.
So yeah, I'm fucking pissed. I've got about 26 logged hours in the file, not including all the time I've spent looking crap up online and dealing with re-opening it every time I want to check something out online. I've probably spent more like 40+ hours on it.
I really do not want to start a new character.