Re-installing Guild Wars?

At the moment I'm having a severe problem with GW. Each and everytime I leave any city or outpost Guild Wars freezes my entire computer within a minute and I have to hard-reboot.

This only came on last night and is severely getting on my nerves, strangely I was playing fine an hour beforehand, yet when I logged back into the game this begins to happen.

Anyway, my main question. If I were to un-install and then re-install Guild Wars, do all my characters and booty stay safe with my account, or will I lose everything? I'm thinking that they should be safe, but I thought I'd better get a second opinion. Also, will I have any problem with my CD-Key?

Thanks.

You won't lose 1 single thing.

By the way, whats your system specs and driver versions.

Josh's right. The client only stores things that are a pain to try and stream actively over the internet. To prevent people from hacking into the client and giving their characters, say 5 million gold with a few key presses, all the accounts are stored server-side. Your CD key is only needed to create the account, you won't need to re-enter it. Since you have an account, you'll just need to remind the client of your e-mail address (if you usually have it set to remember) and type in your password. It might have to re-download stuff for every town and outpost you enter, but that won't affect anything besides load times.

About your original problem, you say it only started happening after you'd been playing a while. How long have you had guild wars? If you've only had it for the hour you'd been playing before the problem, is it a possibility that something in your computer is overheating? If you've had it for a lot longer than that, have you maybe downloaded a virus that deicdes to ruin your fun? (I've never heard of such a virus before, but all viruses have had a time when nobody's heard of them before)

Also like Josh requested, system specs and driver versions?

They will be safe, it would be like installing it on your uncles computer or something, and playing there.

(Major Post Edit)

Do you have Direct Song Music Paks?

It could be Direct Song causing the problem, if so see this thread: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...d.php?t=112375

Install the DRM updates for your system no matter what os / version of wmp you have.

If you don't, I would re-install GuildWars. After the updates from the PvP I had to re-install it due to the update corrupting the gw.dat file causing me not to be able to log in.

Athlon64 3200+ 'Venice'
Asus A8N-SLi nForce4
2GB PC3200 (in dual channel mode)
Asus 'Extreme' 6600GT 256MB DDR3 PCI-e (81.98 WHQL)
200GB SATA Seagate Barracuda
XP Home (SP2 fully updated) with media player 10

I've had Guild Wars since about a month after it came out and have clocked up well over 300 hours. What I meant before is that I was playing it for an hour and closed it down to go for some eats. Then when I loaded it back up afterwards this problem started to occur.

I don't think it's the system as all my other games work just fine. Battlefield 2/Battlefield2: Special Forces, HL2, CSS, FEAR and various flightsims. All work without a problem. I'm very security conscious, but I've checked for viruses, spyware and mal-ware but nothing's present.

It does look like a re-install is in order.

I just got my new computer built and I had copied the entire GW folder onto a dvd
and then I just made a new folder on the new computer and dragged and dropped
the dvd folder into it and worked great.
Probably not the problem, but maybe try the auto-detect feature and see if that helps,
maybe the video card is working a little to hard, if still fails I would disable the
the direct song stuff, heard of other people having trouble with it.

gl

Wait.

Do you have the DirectSong Pak installed?

Josh,

Yes, the free one! Although that's never been a problem before. Unless, it may have had a bad reaction to the new update. Who knows with these bloody computers!

I guess I'll just do a complete re-install and see if that clears it.

Thanks for all your suggestions and help, it was much appreciated! I really mean that!

I've just carried out an un-install and then a complete re-install (thank whoever for broadband) and it seems to be working OK now.

Not to jump the gun, but I'll let you know if it goes tits up again!

Maybe I've missed something, but why would the DirectSong Pak affect anything? I have the free one too, I've been without problems since my original issues within my first week of playing, and that was a long time before I had even heard of DirectSong.

Glad it seems to be fixed.

Some users (more then a few) have reported that when the try to go in to a zone that plays direct song music (the wma file over the music in the gw.dat), the map won't load or freeze up for a bit before it zones you in.

From the different posts and people contacting support it seems to be it "checking" with it's DRM to see if you have the right to play the file causing the delay. It seems to show up more on older versions of windows with windows media player 9 from the looks of things (but may effect some xp users with wmp 10 too). One user did the update (in that link) for WMP DRM files and gets a lot less issues now.

I uninstalled so I could reinstalled GW on a different partition. When I logged on everything was there. So, you'll have no problems

Interesting. I can see how it might affect it now, especially for people whose computers are just barely squeezing out enough computational power to run GW.