Windows 7/COH Question (noobish?)

I just built my first PC, with Windows 7. It's quite the upgrade from a 6 year old rig running XP. After installing COH, I fired it up and everything ran beautifully. When I logged off, I glanced at my desktop shortcut for COH and noticed that there was a small blue and yellow shield in the corner of the icon. When I right-clicked to see what was going on, I saw options for "Run As Administrator" and "Troubleshoot Compatibility".

Although I didn't seem to have any issues, I clicked "troubleshoot compatibility". I was told that the setting were compatible with XP Service Pack 2. Considering that everything appears to be running fine, is this anything I should be bothered by?

Also, why am I being prompted to run COH as the administrator? Is there something that I would need to do as the admin regarding COH?

Sorry if these sound like stupid or paranoid questions, but I'm working on the first computer I've built myself, and I'm clearly new to Windows 7. I looked for some answers on the search, but didn't come up with anything. I just want to make sure I don't screw anything up, and everything is running as best it can. Thanks for any help.

Don't set it to run in XP Compatibilty mode. I've seen reports of people having problems due to that.

You may want to set it to Run as Administrator to make things easier. Basically, Windows 7 and Windows Vista treat programs a bit differently, and programs with Update in the name of the file will require Administrator access to run correctly in some cases. For example, when a new Issue or patch is released, it will need Administrator access to be able to actually download the updates. Without that access, it won't update.

Thanks for the help guys!

This isn't really that much of a problem..... unless you use logitech Setpoint software. If you use Setpoint to program your mouse buttons to generate keystrokes, and then have CoX programmed to activate certain powers, etc., upon those keystrokes, it will stop working. Unless UAC is disabled, Vista and Win7 seems to isolate CoX from other programs, and those keystrokes generated by Setpoint never make it to the game.

Someone once recommended making a copy of the Cohupdater.exe file, and that seems to work. I copied it to another name without "upate" in the name, and when I run it, it runs fine. Now, I run the regular updater just to check to see if there's updates, and then the copy to actually play the game. If there's been an update to the updater, then I just recopy it again. It's a real pain, but at least it lets me use my mouse like I want to use it.

Aarrgh! After days of fighting with tech support to get my SteelSeries WoW mouse to work with CoH, all I had to do was rename COHupdater? For that matter, my Logitech G-series profiler started working too.

I'd tried compatibility mode on COHupdater and CityOfHeroes, I'd tried 'run as administrator' I tried various functions on the mouse/keyboard clients.

I didn't completely turn off UAC. Since it used to work in Vista 64 I didn't think it was a problem.

Thank you for making the suggestion of renaming COHupdater. I never would have thought of that on my own.

I have windows 7 but each time game loads all I get is a blank screen but the game is running in the background


any ideas?

Driver issues.

Almost 99% of issues with CoH that you think are related to Windows 7 has something to do with graphics drivers.

Try upgrading to new drivers. If you have done so, then try rolling back to a different version.

problem solved


Looking better than ever now

Renaming the updater is no solution for EU players.

I consider using a shortcut that bypasses the updater to be a cleaner solution. Just make a shortcut to CityOfHeroes.exe with -project CoH in the target. Make it look like this:

"C:\...\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" -project CoH

For EU players, make it -project EUCoH.

This also lets you get into the game faster if you don't need to patch. But when you do, you'll have to run the updater as usual.