Game freezes when talking to Contacts.

I'm a returning player. My laptop burned up, so i dug out my old computer, and on booting up noticed the CoH shortcut. After Updating windows, and my graphics driver, I downloaded the updates, verified image to be sure, and registered my old account.
My problem has been that talking to contacts, or opening my contact window intermittently freezes the game. It seems rather streaky, sometimes I can do most of an arc without problems. Sometimes I'll freeze every time i speak to a contact for several missions in a row.
Till now relogging has freed up the game, but this evening the game froze when i opened the contact window, and when I relog it starts frozen.
Has anyone else experienced this behavior, or can suggest a solution.

There have been a few threads about it, yes. I'm sure somebody will post the links to them shortly.

In the meantime, I'll assume you are using ATI and if you just updated, you are probably using 10.11 or the new 10.12 driver. There have been 2 common fixes for the issue you are having. Turn off Ultra mode graphics, or roll back to the 10.9 driver version. That one seems to be much more stable when displaying secondary 3d environments like the Contact window, Costume selection, or even when selecting an arc in Ouro.

If I'm wrong, then please post your CoH_Helper and "HiJack This" logs, and/or wait for the links to the other threads about similar issues.

For what it's worth I have the same issue. I have an ATI 5870 and I have a character I can't open because when I do it resets my video card because it is stuck on the contacts window. Don't want to roll back because this driver fixed issues I had with other things so I guess I will wait until there's a fix.

I had the problem with one character that i solved by starting in safe mode then opening and closing the contact window i could then restart as normal and it solved the issue for a while.

You don't necessarily have to play in Safe mode. As I mentioned above, you should be able to just turn Ultra off for it to be stable... at least on the characters that are most affected by it.. until a better driver that suits your needs comes out.

I've tried the suggestions in this thread, and restarted in safe mode . That usualy allows me to log in, and close my contact widow.
The bug also commonly occurs while talking to contacts, and on the rare occasion that a mission clickie brings up a dialog window.
I've a N'vidia 6150 so the problem isn't restricted to ATI, and am running with every possible graphic setting turned off, or at minimum.
This is well below the settings I used successfully with this computer when my account was last active.
As I can restart the computer, and/or play other toons, without affecting the frozen toon, I think there is some server side component to this problem.

The nVidia 6150 is a really old card and, being on the low end of the 6000 series, not a gaming card. I've seen lots of problems reported with using the 2xx.xx series of drivers with the 6000 series of nVidia cards. I'm still having good results on my old XP system with the 197.45 drivers and they were the last of the 1xx.xx series released. They also support Ultra Mode so no worries there. Issue 17 brought us a huge graphical update that included Ultra Mode. This was probably after you were last subscribed.

I'd recommend the following:

Download the 197.45 drivers.
Download and install but don't run Driver Sweeper.
Uninstall the current drivers.
Reboot in Safe Mode and run Driver Sweeper.
Reboot in normal Windows mode and install the 197.45 drivers.

It's not even a card, that's the integrated graphics found on nForce 4 motherboard chipset. The 6200 card looks buff in comparison.

bumping because it's still not fixed. I stopped playing the game because of this bug mid last year. It's still here and still making the game unplayable. I will stop renewing after this and just use free trial accounts to test if the game has been fixed. Maybe a couple more years and they'll figure out how to fix it?!?

Here's my card:

Video Device Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
Manufacturer / Chip: NVIDIA / GeForce GTX 275
Video Memory: 3688 MB
Driver Version: 8.17.12.9610
Driver Date: 2/29/2012 8:02:00 PM
Driver Language: English

Necro post!

I had this happen for the longest time I couldn't log into my main and only joined teams so I never had to use contacts. Its a very weird thing, I found that the problem was my Windows "theme".

I was using the Alienware "Breed" theme, to change Windows default pictures, start menu, etc.

When I went back to regular Windows Aero, I could talk to contacts.

Hope this helps you... good luck!

If you have issues please read

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=231628

FYI, the contact list will load all contacts' character models the first time a tab is opened, in order to generate the picture in the list.
That causes noticeable graphical stutter even on powerful computers.

If your computer is old, and not very powerful, then it will have more trouble with the contact portraits.
(Edit: Also CoH uses the CPU much more than other games for everything. Your CPU matters for graphics performance.)


You have 2 options:
1) Lower your settings.
2) Upgrade your computer.


Edit:
It may be that your old computer is no longer good enough for CoH after all the inefficient additions they made tot he game on top of the old inefficient stuff.

Hello everyone,

Please avoid thread necromancy. If a thread has not seen activity in some time, please create a new thread, and if necessary, link to the old thread. This is to reduce the spread of outdated information and to prevent confusion.

Thanks!
~Mod13