The authors present an analysis of the fault tolerant properties and the effects of temperature on an exclusive OR (XOR) gate and a full adder device implemented using quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) structures. A Hubbard-type Hamiltonian and the Inter-cellular Hartree approximation have been used for modeling, and a uniform random distribution has been implemented for the simulated dot displacements within cells. We have shown characteristic features of all four possible input configurations for the XOR device. The device performance degrades significantly as the magnitude of defects and the temperature increase. Our results show that the fault-tolerant characteristics of an XOR device are highly dependent on the input configurations. The input signal that travels through the wire crossing (also called a crossover) in the central part of the device weakens the signal significantly. The presence of multiple wire crossings in the full adder design has a major impact on the functionality of the device. Even at absolute zero temperature, the effect of the dot displacement defect is very significant. We have observed that the breakdown characteristic is much more pronounced in the full adder than in any other devices under investigation.