I picked up this first expansion a week or so ago though Games For Windows Live (not by choice). We already had an account because my kids play XBox Live so that made things a little easier. I added money for the dumb Microsoft points so I could purchase the content (which is kind of a rip-off since I had to put in more than I needed because of the choices you have to purchase points) and then attempted to download the game. After several attempts which did not appear to do anything, I waited a few hours until it was later in the night and tried again. The GFW client now told me I was downloading the game, but I never saw anything added to my Fallout 3 folder. I tried several times with no luck. Time to do a little digging around.
I checked under C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\GFWLive\Downloads folder and didn’t see anything. I then started the download again and saw a 300+ MB file already in there, even though it said it was downloading. I made a copy of this file and waited until the download finished. I saw the file it was downloading turn into a cab file, but before I could copy it it disappeared. Using a little ingenuity, I changed the name of the file I duplicated earlier into a cab file, opened it in WinZip and Voila! I could see what looked liked the expansion files.
Since I wasn’t sure if these files would work (I had a pretty good idea of which ones I needed, but you can never be too sure), I decided to search the Internet for info and stumbled across a Fallout 3 page on wikia.com. They talked about playing the expansion offline by copying certain files directly to your Fallout 3 folder (see Operation: Anchorage, Playing Offline). The funny thing was they said the files you need are located at: C:Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\XLive\DLC (gee, I thought this was Games For Windows Live, why would I look under a folder obviously referencing XBox Live?). Anyway, the files were there, so at least I have them. Since I paid for them, I wanted to find the files so I could back them up; I certainly don’t want to have to download them again sometime in the future if I want the expansion again.
So now that have the DLC downloading figured out, the next two expansions should go a little easier. Check out all the Fallout 3 info at wikia.com to get more info about the other two expansions coming out for Fallout 3, one in February and one in March.