GW artifacting/crashing on logon screen

Howdy everyone. I recently decided to start playing GW again after an over 2 year hiatus, but for some reason now the game doesn't want to run at all. I'm running Win7 64bit, and I've had the game installed on this system since OS installation (around Jan.-Feb. this year). I've logged on a few times in the past just to do some random running around and the game worked fine. I even logged on just 3 days ago to join a friend's guild and the game ran fine.

Yesterday I try to log on and the log on screen freaks out after about 5 seconds, freezes the game and pops up a message box on my desktop asking if I wanted to report the problem to ArenaNet. I tried several times, sometimes I could get to the character selection, but it always ends up crashing before I can actually enter the game.

I've done some researching and tried some fixes. I've deleted the .dat and the .exe and re-downloaded them. I've uninstalled the game and reinstalled. I've tried launching with the setup instead of the application. I've reinstalled and downloaded the entire game via adding the -image command to the shortcut. Everything ends up the same. Launch the game, ArenaNet splash/updater shows, log on screen shows, log on screen spasms out and crashes. Only the game crashes, windows is just fine. I can alt/tab or ctr+alt+del out to close the game. Sometimes it even lets me use the "X" in the game itself to close it out. Always the ArenaNet box is waiting for me on my desktop, asking to report the problem.

I've made no hardware changes to my system, it's still the exact same configuration it was when the game worked before. The only changes have been to update drivers (and that hasn't even changed in the past 3 days since it last worked). Currently my mobo, video and sound drivers are 100% up to date. Nothing is overheating, cpu is well within spec and my gpu isn't going over idle temp of around 40c.

All other games I'm currently playing work just fine. It's only GW that is experiencing this problem.

OS: Windows 7 64 bit
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5
CPU: AMD Phenom 9600
Video: XFX HD5770
Sound: X-Fi XtremeMusic
Ram: 4gb Mushkin Blackline DDR2800
Monitor: 22" Acer AL2216W

This makes me remember why I had quit playing this game in the first place. It has always been some sort of technical problem like this, or an ISP blocking the game for me.



Edit: Forgot to mention that I run a healthy overclock on my video card using the MSI Afterburner utility. Still, dropping the oc does nothing for the problem. I've also disabled anything running that uses overlays, Steam, Xfire, Afterburner and the problem persists.

Meh, got it figured out. Apparently Xfire screwed something up in the last update. Closing that out ended up fixing the problem. Weird because I had disabled it before, and I know other people who run Xfire with GW and have no problems.

people do have the occasional hiccup with Xfire & GW, normally it's fixed with the next update though. Of course, GW has a history of being extra buggy when a Holiday season/event is running too. :/

Well it looks like Xfire updated again yesterday, so let's see if it's fixed this time. It's kinda retarded having to disable the IM client "made for gamers" just to play a single game!

>.<


Edit: NOPE. Still all buggered up. If anything it's worse now.

/facepalm

/uninstall