Processor hang in CoH since last update

I have been seeing a persistent processor loop resulting in a Video/input/GUI hang while playing the game since this morning's update. In two cases I was in a mission in the middle of a fight, in the third case I was actually zoning into orobourous, all with the same character. I made a 4th attempt with a different character but I didn't even get into the game - hit the loop/hang right at the character selection screen. In each case the video screen appears to freeze up and gets diagonal lines through it, my mouse either quits responding or responds very slowly as does the keyboard and the sound goes out to lunch. My computer hasn't hung - I can access files on it over the network and it slowly responds to input - a CTR+ALT+DEL will bring up the windows security dialog eventually but input is extremely lagged and processor time is pegged at 100%. I can sometimes slowly patiently bring up the task manager and kill the city of heroes process which returns control to me and leaves the system working.

I was working just fine yesterday and I was working ok this most of this morning as well but currently the freeze occurs within minutes of starting up and logging on every time. I ran a virus scan just to be safe and it didn't find anything and other than the CoH update I haven't added anything to the system since yesterday. Unfortantely I get no errors in the system or application log. Would appreciate any suggestions although it looks like it is totally CoH doing this to me. I will try on a different machine to see if I have the same problems although both of my game machines use pretty much the same video card (different manufacturers, same chipset - geforce 8800 gts). Any suggestions would be appreciated as I pretty much can't play on my primary machine right now.

Here is my system information:

---System information gathered by CoH Helper version 0.1.1.7---

DxDiag gathered at July 15, 2009 16:18 (-07:00)
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.090206-1234)
System Manufacturer: System manufacturer
System Model: System Product Name
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Central Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6850 @ 3.00GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 3326MB
.Net Memory Report: 2705MB out of 3326MB available
Page File: 4697MB (511MB currently in use)
C Drive: (WDC WD1600AAJS-08PSA0) 34798MB out of 152624MB (22%) free
D Drive: (NVIDIA RAID5 931.52G) 41075MB out of 953874MB (4%) free
E Drive: (TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S203N) zero-size drive
F Drive: (WR4549S LLL969L SCSI CdRom Device) zero-size drive
Windows directory location: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DirectX Diag version: 5.03.2600.5512 (32-bit version)

Display Notes: No problems found.
Sound Notes: No problems found.
Input Notes: No problems found.

Monitor: Plug and Play Monitor
Monitor's Max Resolution: 1600,1200
Video Device Name: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
Manufacturer / Chip: NVIDIA / GeForce 8800 GTS
Video Memory: 640.0 MB
Driver Version: 6.14.0011.6921
Driver Date: 12/5/2007 2:41:00 AM
Driver Language: English

Sound Device Description: SoundMAX HD Audio
Driver File: ADIHdAud.sys
Driver Version: 5.10.0001.6110
Driver Date: 1/15/2007 6:09:06 PM


WMI Information
Motherboard Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Motherboard Model: (empty)
Motherboard Product: StrikerExtreme
Motherboard Version: 1.XX
BIOS Manufacturer: Phoenix Technologies, LTD
BIOS Name: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
BIOS Version: Nvidia - 42302e31
BIOS Release: 20070822000000.000000+000

Registry Information for Current User
Resolution: 1920x1200
3D Resolution: 1920x1200 (Not using renderscale)
Full Screen: Yes
Maximized: No
Screen Position: 0, 0
Refresh Rate: 60Hz
Vertical Sync Enabled: Yes

Physics Quality: High
Maximum Particles: 50000
Max Particle Fill? 10.000
Physics Card Enabled: No

Anti-aliasing: 4x
Anisotropic Filtering: 4x
Texture LOD Bias: Smooth
Water Effects: High Quality
Bloom: 1.000 (turned on)
Depth of Field Enabled: No
Desaturation Effects (Sepia) Enabled: Yes
Shader Detail: High

World Texture Level: Very High
Character Texture Level: Very High
World Detail Level (Vis_Scale): 2.000
Entity Detail Level: 2.000
Shadows Enabled: Yes
Gamma Correction: 0.855
Geometry Buffers (VBOs) Enabled: Yes
Suppression of Extra Player FX Enabled: No
Suppression of FX When Camera Close Enabled: No
Close Suppression Range: 3.000
Show Advertisements: Yes

Audio Mode: Performance
3D Audio: No
FX Sound Volume: 0.797
Music Sound Volume: 0.000

Show Advanced Graphics Options: Yes
Overall Graphics Quality: 1.000
Reverse Mouse Buttons: No
Save Login Username: Yes
Transfer Rate: 331527 bytes/second
Current Game Version: 19.20090702.4T
Installation Directory: C:\Program Files\City of Heroes

Mod files in the Data directory
. has 1 file
.\texts\English\Menus has 6 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\city has 1 file
.\texture_library\MAPS\Safeguard has 9 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\sewers has 44 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\static has 34 files
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\Outdoor_Missions has 9 files
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\Static has 16 files

---

Globals: @Midnight Mystique/@Magik13

Your video drivers are pretty old. Unfortunately, the latest drivers from nVidia have been pretty bad. Try installing these slightly old drivers. (The latest drivers DO work for a lot of folks, including me, but it's easier to upgrade than downgrade so I would try the older ones first.)

---

It looks like its a heat problem - my cpu is spiking up to 55C and above. It looks like it was just that CoH was the only thing I run that stresses the system enough to push up the temp.

Now I have to play around with heat sinks/fans and figure out why I am suddenly heat spiking when I wasn't before.

I did install the updated drivers you suggested and they seem to work fine.

---

Globals: @Midnight Mystique/@Magik13

Dust of course is one of the most common sources of heat.

I generally remove fans and heatsinks in order to fully blow out all of the little crevices and such where dust collects.

Also, while the system is running, look at all of the fans, including the GPU fan if there is one. Are they turning freely? Are any seemingly slow to start spinning or have a loping action in one area?

Oddly enough, seized fan bearings are one of the biggest causes of heat-related failure.

---

If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.

Black Pebble is my new hero.

Your free space on your drives is rather low. Windows and CoH are both installed on the C: drive and you have a mere 22% free space available for them to use.

That's .... really pushing things in my opinion.

Your RAID drive has even less free space, so there's no moving stuff to that drive to free up space.

I'd burn some things off to CD or DVD if possible to free up space on the C: drive and see if that has any effect at all on how the game runs.

---

If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.

Black Pebble is my new hero.

[ QUOTE ]
Your free space on your drives is rather low. Windows and CoH are both installed on the C: drive and you have a mere 22% free space available for them to use.

That's .... really pushing things in my opinion.

Your RAID drive has even less free space, so there's no moving stuff to that drive to free up space.

I'd burn some things off to CD or DVD if possible to free up space on the C: drive and see if that has any effect at all on how the game runs.

[/ QUOTE ]


You are looking at the %free and not paying attention to the actual free space - I have 35 GB of freespace on C: and 41 GB of freespace on D:. Thats not a lot out of the total (nearly 1 terabyte) but its a lot more space then most apps need. I do have stuff I can delete, especially on C:, but I doubt those are causing problems.

At this point I am fairly sure it is either my heat sink not working correctly or my video card overheating/malfunctioning as I am seeing the freeze almost as soon as I boot up the sytem and I just got a bluescreen in the video driver. Fortunately I have spare parts to play around with so I don't have to buy a new video card just to find out that wasn't broken.

Thanks for the advice folks, hopefully this won't be to ugly to fix.

---

Globals: @Midnight Mystique/@Magik13

[ QUOTE ]
It looks like its a heat problem - my cpu is spiking up to 55C and above.

[/ QUOTE ]
I'm skeptical that's the problem. I have a Core2 Duo CPU also and my system runs constantly at 59-61C (I run SETI At Home which keeps the CPU at 100% utilization.)

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Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project

[ QUOTE ]
You are looking at the %free and not paying attention to the actual free space - I have 35 GB of freespace on C: and 41 GB of freespace on D:. Thats not a lot out of the total (nearly 1 terabyte) but its a lot more space then most apps need. I do have stuff I can delete, especially on C:, but I doubt those are causing problems.

[/ QUOTE ]
He's right to look at % free. Having 4% free on one drive is undoubtedly causing access issues. I don't see how it could be causing your crashing, but it is most assuredly gimping your system to some extent.

---

Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project

Hard Drive cleaning ====


1. Go to control panel and then Add/Remove Programs and get rid of any programs you don't need any more.

2. Go into Windows Explorer (not the Internet Explorer) and right click on your C: drive and chose Properties. Under the General Tab, you'll see a button for Disk Cleanup, run it and get rid of deleted (recycle bin) and temp files.

3. Under the General Tab, make sure Indexing is not selected. Unless you need to do quick searches of your documents on a regular basis, you don't need this. It may take a while to propagate the un-indexing to all the sub-folders.

4. Go to the Tools Tab and click on the defrag button. Run the defragger. It may take an hour or two to defrag. Make sure the computer doesn't power down during it (you'll find power options where you change the screen saver -- right click on desktop...).

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Speeding Through New DA Repeatables || Spreadsheet o' Enhancements || Zombie Skins: better skins for these forums || Guide to Guides

[ QUOTE ]
It looks like its a heat problem - my cpu is spiking up to 55C and above.

[/ QUOTE ]

55C shouldn't be that bad I'd think. If it were 65+ then maybe (MAYBE... 75+ is more likely a problem area), but 55 should be a safe operational temperature.

---

Thermal Limit on an E6850 is 72C which is when I think the CPU will start to throttle itself.

You can use CoreTemp to monitor CPU temps. I personally don't like SpeedFan.

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