Haven't played for 6 months because of crashes.. til today!

Now I'm not going to even say that this will work for everyone, but let me give you a brief history of the problems I've had running GW.

I had an ATI Raedon 9800, Zone Alarm Pro, SoundBlaster Audigy 2, and GW ran just fine. Suddenly, around April, I began having lock-up issues. I'd get in the game and I'd get intermittent sound, sporadic mouse pauses, couldn't access Windows, and then the BSoD (NOTE: My BSoD was because I run my PC on a LCD TV that only displays two resolutions, otherwise I get a blue screen). Windows would basically lock up, and I'd have to reboot.

Then my sister purchased both of us 'new' videocards, nVidia GeForce 7600GS. I thought.. hmm.. if the problem is my videocard, this will solve it. No such luck. I replaced my Zone Alarm Pro firewall with Comodo, and still the problem remained. Even changed Antivirus from Norton to McAfee. Same thing. Defragged, ran Spybot, eliminated programs, checked my RAM, made sure Windows was ok, updated drivers, everything you'd do to diagnose a problem. Today my sister wanted me to repair Windows, and I refused, because the problem was only with GW, not any of the other games I regularly played. We moved the GW directory to another hard drive to see if perhaps I was about to lose a drive, and it locked up afterwards.

Then she said that I should rename my .dat file and download everything again. I did so, with the -image switch at the end of the command line. Two hours later I enter the game, and successfully played it for 3 hours - only 3 cuz I'm really tired.

So for those of you who are having the same/similar problems, you may want to try renaming your .dat file, and then re-installing the game with the -image switch (which you have to remove after the files download). If this topic doesn't vanish, and I start locking up again I'll certainly repost, but it seems that was the fix I needed.

If you Gw.dat file ever gets corrupted, normally the game would detect it. Sometimes though, it doesn't and that means you need to redownload the .dat file.

There's a chance that it was detected by the game, but I couldn't tell or see it because of my special version of the BSoD. All I'd get is a locked PC.

I'm about to get in the game and see if it behaves today. If not I'll post here so folks will know that it's still an issue.

Worth mentioning that after you have done the -image you should then delete the renamed gw.dat, as it currently weights in at just over 3Gb and so having 2 copies of it doesn't do you any favours

Hey thanks izzy! That's too big of a file to have two of, indeed :-)

Ok, so my PC crashed a little while ago, due to a video driver. I was able to change my resolution to 640x480 and see the message it left. So then when I rebooted, I turned off the -dx8 switch, and the game locked up twice. I put the switch back on to force Guild Wars to use DirectX 8.0 and I've been in the game since.

At least I'm narrowing the field as far as multiple issues goes :-)

OK I said I'd come and update every step of the way and we had another thing happen. My PC started crashing again, so I took the DirectX switch off, and let it use 9.0c instead of 8 because apparently that didn't make a difference. Then sis and I thought I'd try to reinstall DirectX, and it just kept telling me that it was already installed. My sister then asked me what my monitor refresh rate was, and I told her it was 60. She told me to go into DirectX Diagnosis (Start/Run/dxdiag) and make sure the refresh rate was the same in there. It wasn't - it was 75. I lowered it to 60, and then went back in the game, intentionally trying to get it to crash. After a day of gameplay I didn't have much patience so I only tested it for about an hour, but tomorrow is another day and I hope to be able to test it again and post here if I have anymore problems.

It's just that so many people reported similar problems that I wanted to see if anything I'm trying will work for anyone else.

Until tomorrow...

Sorry I didn't come back when I said I would, life and such got in the way.

Game has still been crashing, so the last time it did I went into "Search" and did a search for any files named "ATI" - my previous videocard. I removed them all and rebooted. Today is the first time I've played since then and as of yet, no crash.

..but as we've discovered, that doesn't mean anything *lol* :-)

If it still crashes you may want to even consider looking over your peripherals.

I once had a game crash repeatedly just because I had bluetooth devices on the computer. It ran fine after uninstalling them and replacing them with some older USB components.

I've also had some bad experiences with Vista recently where the computer would bluescreen and reboot right after pulling a USB mouse out. (This was patched a little while back in an update).

Sometimes having parts installed with drivers or just being very out of the ordinary could result in conflicts with other applications.

I didn't read every sentence, but did you do basic maintenance for the hardware? Your cpu or gpu could be overheating if the fans/heatsinks fill up with dust or are not spinning fast enough. Check all the fans and vents to make sure they aren't all clogged. Also I don't think that 7600 is much faster than your 9800 pro in GW. So if cleaning helps, you might want to return it and wait for a sale on 7900GS (Goes on sale for around $100) or better card for some real improvement.

Hey Showtime!

Yeah I did maintanence on the hardware also, which was relatively easy since I built this system from the case up. I have a Thermaltake fan, and the temp is low, cleaned the heatsink and fan also, everything looks good. The 'upgraded' video card was because my sis was buying one and thought.. hmm, I'll buy one for her, it wasn't a necessary upgrade at all. In fact, my 9800 is in its box cuz I really liked that card Normally I'd sell it or give it to someone, but not that one.. not yet anyway.

I am a regular player of F.E.A.R. and it never crashes my PC. There are only two games that crash my PC - Guild Wars and one of the PopCap games, "Chuzzle" - Chuzzle has only crashed it once and I thought it was weird because it's similar to the problem I have with GW crashing.

For now, I'm at a loss. We're talking about a system rebuild after the first of the year which I'd rather not do, but a lot of time, and money has gone into being a GW player, and I'm rather annoyed that I can't play. Today I've had two crashes back to back, last night I crashed once. It's so random it's unbelievable. Just have no idea what to do now.

Just a thought here but you made mention of the pop cap game crashing your system. My antivirus views pop cap downloads as trojans, yeah they are full of spyware, and I have to override the anti virus to play. I wonder if one of your spyware programs or one of your antivirus programs is getting something from GW that triggers it and causes the crash.


Try turning off every thing like that and playing and see what happens. If no crashes then add them back one at a time until you find the culprit.