post-game unwinding

Good news: I'm fairly certain that the Vista Service Pack 2 has fixed the video crash bug I had ("your video driver has stopped and restarted" -- something like that). It downloaded and installed itself several weeks ago, and that crash hasn't happened since.

Bad news: The service pack, and possibly the fix for this video bug fix itself, has added many seconds (20-40) of post-game shutdown, which I associate with virtual memory unwinding. The disk drive has tons of activity, the windows backdrop is essentially inactive for the first half of this time, and there will always eventually be a complete video refresh where the screen goes blank and then the backdrop will appear again.

I'm curious if other folks are experiencing this, and if there is an easy way to minimize these effects.

Some of the specs on my system are:

* Intel Core 2 CPU 6420 @ 2.13 GHz
* 2 GBytes RAM
* 32-bit operating system (Windows Vista Home Premium, Service Pack 2)
* GeForce 9500 GT graphic processor
* DirectX version 10.1
* 4.8 Windows Experience Index

I play in full-screen mode at HD resolution (1920x1080), which is also the size of my normal backdrop). I tried to go to windowed mode once, but nothing happened on the restart. This wasn't really important to me at the time, so I didn't pursue it. Neither Ultima Online (enhanced client) nor Dragon Age: Origins exhibit this behavior. When I exit them, they are immediately done. Prior to service pack 2, there was a much shorter post-game unwind period in CoX.

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-- Rich
* Thresholds CoH: What to do When
* My Comics Collection

No one is seeing anything similar?

Sorry for the bad name I gave this thread. I can see how folks might skip over it -- "what's *that* doing in a tech issues forum?" I meant the unwinding of virtual memory, not that of a player after he exits the game.

Another, likely related, effect I've seen since Vista SP2 is a slowness to show the backdrop while I'm still playing. It used to be that if I wanted to bring up Mids Hero Designer while in game, it was a quick click of the Windows key and choosing Mids from the task bar. Now it takes many seconds for the task bar to come up, and sometimes it vanishes immediately after it comes up. If that happens, pressing the Windows key again then brings up the task bar fast, but the system had to do something the first time round.

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-- Rich
* Thresholds CoH: What to do When
* My Comics Collection