FOW & Animated Weapons Crashes... Blank screen and Audio loop on soundcard resulting

Ok, I've been around here for a while and have been playing GW since April of '05, but I still haven't seem to come across a similar posted problem, so here goes nothing...

Guildwars is very stable for me normally, it rarely crashes if at all. However, without fail, whenever I enter the FOW, I usually end up experiencing some sort of crash.. I hear really wierd sounds/repeating music sounds on my speakers and my screen goes to black and the monitor goes to powersave mode (like its receiving no signal)... The wierd garbled and repeating audio loop continues indefinately on my soundcard...
I believe this is caused by the complex animations of the Chaos Axes wielded in FOW, as this is where I always seem to crash (when there are a lot of baddies with them around me).

Just today I also experienced the same type of crash, but today it was while I looked at my nice new Glacial Blade and its animation (essentially spinning my character around)... Same result though, crash , looped audio, and no way of recovering besides doing a hard reset/cutting the power (Complete windows crash).


Any ideas from my illustrious and knowledgable Guru peeps??


Thanks so much for all your help.

Das

PS: I'm running an ATI 1650 as my video-card (had the same problems with my ATI 9800 Pro AIW), so this shouldnt' be the cause of the crashes by any means...

Hmm, no replies I take it I'm the only one with this bizarre issue... must be something about my rig
No one else gets crashes where the sound loops over and over eh?

I get the sound loop when I have like 9 things being downloaded guild wars up and some moron spamming vent with binds but it is just a massive lag spike for me and I don't crash I am sure it is not a chaos axe because of the animation (what animation? lol), and my computer is not as powerful as yours is (I am sure of it nvidia geforce ti 4200 graphics card ).

I wouldn't be surprised if this was caused by corrupted data in your GW install. Have you tried re-downloading a fresh gw.dat file using the "gw.exe -image" switch?

No I haven't Hodor.. Gosh, I wonder.. That would be a very simple fix to a problem that's been plaguing me for some time... I'll try it out asap and let you know the result, thank you for the suggestion for a solution (finally!)

- I've never actually done an -image switch, but from what you have said, it must overwrite
the .dat file automatically when you use the switch? I know it downloads the ENTIRE .dat file
which could take a while.. :P But I thought it just downloaded the missing parts?

i have also had problems - stretched characters and black screen. For me they started when I used the hourglass staff. I turned of anti-aliasing and they went away. Could something in the pre-release bonus pack be causing conflict I wonder

i doubt its the prerelease back. i use the hourglass staff and glacial blade on different characters. no problems.

AMD althlon 64 x2 5300+ 2.6ghz
2 gig Mushkin DDR2 800 ram
Asus M2A-VM mobo
Sapphire ULTIMATE Radeon x1950 pro



edit: lol mystype for my proc.... its an x2 not an x4

What Operating System? And a lot other questions about hard drive maintance, defrag, chkdsk ect. Yes, doing the full image download does help.
Have you installed the latest DX update from MS? There is one for August already.
Given the wide range of issues caused by FMod, have you tried the -dsound switch?

Is your 3D card overclocked or running hot? I overclocked my card it i got the loop sound thing you're describing. It fixed itself in a couple seconds and i turned the OC speed down a bit.

make sure your video card is on it's own 12v rail from the power supply.. it sounds to me like your card isn't getting enough juice