"she's been with everybody... I'm suprised I'm not dead yet from her"
Heh, for some reason I see that line coming up in the marriage counselling session with Hakunin.
Just from my personal experience, playing solo seems much easier than with NPCs. So kudos for assembling your team and keeping them alive.
"Even had Xorn the deathclaw join in (was
bugged though, alarm sounded, then he joined, got
experience for him leaving when I unlocked, but he
didn't leave)."
Hmmm, did you climb out of the level 1 floor, and waited? What's suppose to happen is the game waits for approximately 10-15 seconds, then it fades to black briefly. Then it registers Xorn successfully escaping.
Though I think I did experience a rare glitch once, very similar to what you have just described. Unfortunately I couldn't remember what I did to fix it, or if I did fix it at all.
Big guns is quite handy, though some of the ammo can be pretty scarce. What's kind of funny is some people don't like the knockback effect. I personally do. But it reminds me of the debates in D1 involving knockback weapons.