glowing white blocks - extensive problem

I've had guild wars for a couple of years and this bug has shown up only recently (i.e. the last year or so) and initially it was only the white boxes which I could deal with, but now it's gotten impossible; I've read all the threads I could find on this forum and by googling on this bug and here is a description of it with all the solutions I've tried:

Problem:
I see glowing white boxes instead of people everywhere. After some careful observation, I noticed that it's only people with a melee class who show up like this, everyone else has a normal appearance; i.e. anyone with a war or derv primary or secondary shows up as a glowing box. Hell, even MY OWN warrior is a white box.

Most NPCs with a melee class have an animation that shows them jumping out of nowhere then taking a couple of steps to where they should be, over and over. A lot of melee human enemies also have this animation, EVEN while they are in combat.

Some of my heros have no movement animations. They just float from spot to spot as commanded and even while attacking it just shows them frozen in one pose. Some enemies have this same problem.

Guild wars keeps crashing randomly. No particular situations just happens when I'm least expecting it. THen when I go back in it always "repairs data archive" which does NOTHING to fix any of the bugs. I must've repaired it hundreds of times since the first time these bugs appeared and they stay the same.

Solutions:
Most common solution I found was to repair it. Read last paragraph for the effectiveness of that.

Installing latest drivers did nothing. I have Catalyst 8.1, Radeon 9800 Pro.

Already ran checkdisk several times.

Another solution I've found is deleting and redownloading the gw.dat file. However, that file is huge and I've seen a lot of ppl post that that did nothing to help and I'd rather not try that unless as a last resort.

Any alternate solutions I can try would be appreciated. GW has become nearly unplayable for me; I could tolerate all the constant graphics anomalies but the random crashing is just hard to work with.

maybe set your graphics lower. You could be running on a comp not able to run gw anymore

I had to update my comp about 6 months ago to play without a constant state of 400-600 ping

now it barely ever goes about 50-60

yeah my friend had the h=white box problem just before Factions came out it was heaps funny. i will have to contact him to see if he got any screenies! best glitch ever lol. all his amour came up as white boxxes to and when he took of the amour he was his normal self.

I hate to say it but.. it sounds like your gw.dat is corrupted : /

I had to redownload it on a network where I only get 4 gb per week, so I had to do it partially on the last day of one week, and finish the next morning. But, it fixed my problem, so I recommend it.

If you have the original discs, reinstalling from them would be the best solution, although I know not everybody owns them/has access to them (mine were 1200 miles away when I needed them).

I use to have this problem a lot. Most likely your gw.dat file is corrupted. You'll probably get the repairing corrupted files message whenever you open guild wars. I would re-install then do a -image and see if that fixes it.

it goes away trust me lol... it took about a year for my friends to stop so just do what he said

You shouldnt have to reinstall, only delete the gw.dat file in the guildwars program folder.

Just do a -repair and it should resolve it.

The -image thing does take some time, but it should do the trick. Just set it to run over-night, or while you're at work/school.

The basic procedure can be found on these forums somewhere.

Or, to re-iterate the instructions since I'm bored...

First, in your guild wars folder, delete gw.dat.

Second, from the desktop, right-click on the shortcut to gw.exe, select properties, select shortcut.

In the target box, it should say something along the lines of C:\Progra~1\Guildwars\gw.exe

Change this to read: C:\Progra~1\Guildwars\gw.exe -image

Click save, then doubleclick the gw icon to start the imaging process - this will take ages, so leave it overnight if necessary. Once it's complete, re-edit the shortcut back to the way it was. Most of us have two GW shortcuts - one to play the game and one to run -image on regular occasions; it makes sense.

I believe you can achieve the same effect using the RUN command.