Multiple system changes, and a few bugs...insight please

OK, so I have been playing GW for almost 2 years now. My system started out as:

EVGA 680i mainboard
2 x XFX 7900gs GPU's in SLI
2GB Kingston HyperX pc6400 ram
Maxtor SATA HDD
PCP&C Silencer 750W PSU
Pentium D 805 2.66GHz
Windows XP Pro 32-bit
Everything run at stock speeds

Obviously, I scrimped on the CPU. When I build systems I tend to do that, as CPU's and PCI cards are easy to swap out later on, and it leaves me a little more $ to initially spend on MB's and PSU. Anyway, GW ran just fine for a long time, the only problem I ran into was that the game would occasionally freeze my system, forcing me to do a manual reboot. I found a thread here on the forum that recommended manually setting CPU affinity so only 1 core handled GW; that seemed to fix that problem.

Late last year I upgraded to an E8400 CPU. At that point GW even ran fine without setting the CPU affinity. Have enjoyed pretty much problem-free gaming since. Anyways, I wanted to install some more RAM, so I decided to upgrade to a 64-bit OS. I bought 2 more gigs of Kingston HyperX, and Vista Home Premium x64. Installed everything, downloaded all updates from Microsoft, downloaded all the newest drivers for my hardware.

However, now GW has a couple problems. At first, there was a big flickering black bar right through the middle of my screen. I tweaked my graphic settings, and ended up taking anti-aliasing from none up to 4x. That made it mostly go away, but I still get occasional full-screen flickers. I could just be running through an area, and my screen will flicker at a regular pace, like once a second. Looks kind of like lagging, except my character doesn't do any rubber-banding, gameplay still progresses at a normal pace, so it's got to be a display issue, not lagging. I set my monitor refresh rate at 60Hz, which matches my setting in Windows. All my graphic settings are at max. I run Windows at 1280 x 1024, and GW at 1024 x 768, full screen, not windowed. Even with maxed settings I still get 59-61FPS. Only issue is the darn flickering.

The other issue, which is not as major but just as annoying, is that every time I close GW, Windows Media Center starts up. I looked through its settings menu but cannot find a way to disable it. Anyone have any insight about either of these problems? Thanks in advance.

With them cards you ought to treat yourself to a nice 20" Widescreen, lol. 1280x1024 is much too small!

As for your problem.. If it happened after you changed your hardware (adding RAM) maybe the ram is reacting badly with the hardware or it is bad, or it is a random vista problem ON top of the fact that GW is 32 bit.

Sounds like RAM to me though, you'd be surprised some of the wacky problems a messed up RAM chip can cause.

I had a problem where my upgraded RAM was bad and it was causing a chain reaction with the graphics card, crashing the driver and the GPU itself until I swapped back to my old ram.

Check GW shortcut and remove -mce if it's there.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Command_Line#-mce

Try running with just 2GB of RAM..... also disable SLI and see what happens.

Thanks everyone for the help. The shortcut did have the -mce command in it. Removed it and Media Center no longer starts on its own. Also, it appears that the flickering is caused by having my GPU's in SLI. Maybe I'll just have to leave it off till Nvidia releases a new driver. Or get around to upgrading to better cards. Anyways, thanks again for the help.

Glad you got the media center issue fixed. As for the SLI issue, back up the driver. I found that almost any pre-CUDA driver works vastly better driving my XFX 7900gs than any driver that supports CUDA.