Random Crashing to Desktop

OK, I just bought City of Heroes/Villains Combined (Online purchase) after having my 14 day Free Trial, the end of which coincided with me purchasing a new PC.

I installed CoX and it worked fine for a few days, no problems. The day the problems started, I had just installed F.E.A.R. and S.T.A.L.K.E.R, and also Daemon Tools for loading images so I don't have to faff round with changing CD's/DVD's every time I want to switch games.

CoX now crashes randomly, most often with no error message, straight to desktop at totally random intervals, sometimes after playing for an hour, other times on the loading screen at login, and sometimes just from switching characters.

I'm running Windows XP Professional with SP3 on a nice shiny new Quad core system (I still don't trust Vista)

Specs: Intel Core2Quad Q6600 G0 stepping
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB(Sparkle)
2GB OCZ Reaper Edition PC8500 RAM
Asus P5K SE Mobo
550W OCZ ModStream Power Supply
500GB Samsung Spinpoint HDD (SATA II)

Any ideas please? This is driving me bonkers

I can't see any problems with the specs.

My guess is Daemon is ruining your fun, if nothing else. It wouldn't be other games. Try uninstalling Daemon, and try the game then, if there is no longer problems then you must believe that Daemon is causing it and unfortunately you'll have to keep without it in that case.

Although this is just a guess, but nothing else on your computer that you have shown us deducts suspicion. (Sherlock Holmes style )

Are all your drivers fully up to date?

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I can't see any problems with the specs.

My guess is Daemon is ruining your fun, if nothing else. It wouldn't be other games. Try uninstalling Daemon, and try the game then, if there is no longer problems then you must believe that Daemon is causing it and unfortunately you'll have to keep without it in that case.

Although this is just a guess, but nothing else on your computer that you have shown us deducts suspicion. (Sherlock Holmes style )

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Tried uninstalling F.E.A.R. and Daemon Tools, as F.E.A.R messed with DirectX when I installed it for some reason, also tried reinstalling DirectX 9.0c to make sure. Still had same problems. Driver versions were all updated to latest, including the Sound Blaster Audigy SE I forgot to mention previously 175.19 Nvidia drivers I believe it was. Nothing seemed to be helping, so I thought "balls to it" and seeing as it's a fairly recent XP installation, I went the whole hog and formatted and reinstalled. Am testing it out now, fingers crossed will all be ok again. Thanks for the replies guys

Hmm played for several hours with no crashes, the only thing I have really done differently is not to install those games or daemon tools, and I have also stuck with XP Service Pack 2 rather than upgrading to SP3... Perhaps the SP3 was actually the problem? Oh and I also haven't updated the Graphics/Sound drivers...Hmmm

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Hmm played for several hours with no crashes, the only thing I have really done differently is not to install those games or daemon tools, and I have also stuck with XP Service Pack 2 rather than upgrading to SP3... Perhaps the SP3 was actually the problem? Oh and I also haven't updated the Graphics/Sound drivers...Hmmm

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I can't see how the SP would be the problem, it hasn't affected any of my games.

If any guess then it has to be the drivers. Are they Omega drivers? Or any other third party drivers?

Same thing happened to me and it was Nvidia drivers for a 8800 GTX. With version 169.25 I has exactly same problem as you. With version 175.16, my screen just went black and not even ctrl+alt+del would sort it. I tried to eliminate by hand all the *nv4*.* files in safe mode and most of them couldn't because pottie said I needed permissions, so I downloaded driver cleaner 1.5, made a clean install of the latest NVidia drivers which are 175.19 and now every now and then my screen goes black and the computer displays a message "The driver stopped responding" or something like that. I guess it is an improvement since it happens only once or twice a day and I don't need to press the restart button, now I "just" have to restart the system after every crash since CoX won't load again if I don't restart.


I think it is about time NVidia gets a decent driver version for Vista.-

Edit: Oh, I just realized you have XP so I guess your problem is unrelated to mine, I'll take my coat...

I also may not be having the same problem, but I am relieved to see that I am not the only one with the problem that Nightmarer is having.

175.16, black screen and had to hard power off. 175.19, black screen and back to desktop with video driver not responding. I had it working perfectly on 163.69 but my computer won't let me reinstall that without throwing a series of .dll errors.

So yeah, a pointless post (sorry I couldn't be more help) but I would just like to agree with Nighmarer in wanting nvidia to give me a driver that allows me to play CoX without crashes...

For what it's worth; I'm currently using the 175.19's under Vista x64 Ultimate and experience no crashes of any kind in CoH, or any other game. This is a clean system though, only built 2 weeks ago; and I make sure I manually remove all driver files in safe mode after uninstalling before I install the new ones.