Game freezes on "Save Matthew Habashy From Arachnos" mission

After finally getting CoH onto this machine (and all the required updates to my system beforehand), I've started the game today with a Tech Blaster Hero.
I've encountered an apparently consistent crash in the "Save Matthew Habashy and Atlas from Arachnos" mission given out by the contact Aaron Thiery. At the end of the Arachnos base instant, I'm supposed to talk to Matthew. When I do that, the game freezes my system completely - I can't alt+tab back, call up Task Manager or do anything other than a hard reboot of my system.
I'm not sure if it's related to the problem, but Matthew remains face-down the entire time after I've defeated the enemy guarding him.

Output from COHHelper (mind you, it's still giving me an error about the COH registry data not being found):

Apart from the standard, obligatory spiel about checking for newer drivers...
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

Do you know what this is? I don't recognise it and it does seem to be suspiciously named (especially if you note the folder & location).

Quote:

Originally Posted by McNum Between the Loyalists and Resistance, I'd be tempted to support Praetorian Hamidon. One side uses mind police and will "disappear" you and the other uses poison gas and bombs on civilians. Hamidon? He'll just have a tree eat you. Much simpler. If we're all going to be oppressed and/or killed by someone, it might as well be the walking trees. At least they don't speak in annoying code or doublespeak. They just devour you.

Nevermind, got past that one too.

Three further freezes: first when switching to the "Detectives" tab in navigation, next was immediately upon re-entering the game after rebooting from the last one, the last occurring when I brought up the costume change menu (which worked fine literally a minute earlier).

The last freeze was connected with two symptoms: first, I tried to bring up the costume change menu using the K button. For some reason, that failed to occur, so I clicked the menu and tried to start it from there. That made the costume change menu show up - with my primary and secondary slots both showing the "unlock slot this in the game" message - upon which it froze.

Unless I'm missing something, each time seems to be occurring when my copy of the game is trying to communicate with the server (I'm playing on Union, BTW).

Three more: Talking to a character during a mission (when it was supposed to trigger several mobs to spawn), passed just fine the next day. Opening the Contacts tab in Nav and logging in after the reboot from the last one.

That last one happened after I manually shut down just about every non-essential software running in the background, so we can be reasonably sure it's not that.
After checking the ATI drivers page again I've noticed that the version they announced would be the last to support the Radeon 9600 series (9.3) is older than the one they directed me to download last time around (10.2). I'm going to try downgrading to 9.3 and see if it changes anything.

The downgrade fixed something, since display glitches in Blender (which kept plaguing me when I installed 10.2) are gone, but no change with CoH.
The crashes occurred twice since and true to established pattern: when logging in again after that crash (with the Nav/Contacts dialog open) - and then when talking to a character to complete a mission.

There seem to be two past incidents where similar issues were described:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=193115
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=248462

Some further googling indicates I need to either change my graphic settings or uninstall the official ATI drivers and install a modified version called "Omega drivers".

The 10.2 AMD Catalyst Display Driver appear to be the latest available from AMD for your video card and are probably the best drivers to try.

One of the graphical features which has been problematic with older drivers is the water effect. It looks like your CoH Helper output is truncated and I can't see what your graphics settings are set to. Could you try and post the output from CoH Helper again?

The water effects were disabled the entire time.

It seems I managed to solve the problem by changing my GPU settings. In the Catalyst Control Center, I've disabled Adaptive Anti-Aliasing, Catalyst AI and VPU Recover, then in the game I've disabled anisotropic filtering and decreased character model detail to 80 %.

After that, I've been able to run the game for six straight hours, multiple plot missions and multiple interactions with different contacts without a single crash.

I'm not exactly sure which of the things I did made the difference, TBH. Most likely culprit is VPU Recover - I've seen quite a few mentions of it causing crashes in games.

Quote:

It looks like your CoH Helper output is truncated and I can't see what your graphics settings are set to. Could you try and post the output from CoH Helper again?

It returns the exact same thing, as always preceded by the error message:

Quote:

---System information gathered by CoH Helper version 0.2.0.2--- DxDiag gathered at listopada 24, 2011 14:02 (+01:00) Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Dodatek Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.101209-1647) System Manufacturer: K7UPG System Model: K7Upgrade-880 BIOS: Default System BIOS Central Processor: AMD Sempron(tm) 2500+, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.7GHz Memory: 1024MB .Net Memory Report: 166MB out of 1023MB available Page File: 1607MB (818MB currently in use) C Drive: (WDC WD1600AAJB-00J3A0) 4166MB out of 30004MB (13%) free D Drive: (ST350041 8AS SCSI Disk Device) 18196MB out of 476937MB (3%) free F Drive: (WDC WD1600AAJB-00J3A0) 4471MB out of 122621MB (3%) free G Drive: (WDC WD50 00AVJS-63TRA SCSI Disk Device) 7575MB out of 476937MB (1%) free H Drive: (SAMSUNG SP2514N) 61700MB out of 238472MB (25%) free E Drive: (ATAPI iHAP122 W) zero-size drive K Drive: (HUAWEI Mass Storage USB Device) zero-size drive J Drive: (SCSI DVD-ROM 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: Samsung SyncMaster 753DF(T) Monitor's Max Resolution: 1280,1024 Video Device Name: YUAN RADEON 9600 Manufacturer / Chip: ATI Technologies Inc. / ATI Radeon Graphics Processor AGP (0x4150) Video Memory: 128.0 MB Driver Version: 6.14.0010.6925 Driver Date: 2009-02-25 22:41:10 Driver Language: English Sound Device Description: C-Media Wave Device Driver File: cmuda.sys Driver Version: 5.12.0001.0041 Driver Date: 2004-01-08 05:37:02 WMI Information Motherboard Manufacturer: Motherboard Model: (empty) Motherboard Product: K7Upgrade-880 Motherboard Version: 1.0 BIOS Manufacturer: American Megatrends Inc. BIOS Name: Default System BIOS BIOS Version: A M I - 8000426 BIOS Release: 20040826000000.000000+000

That error message makes no sense, as the registry keys most certainly exist - these are the contents of the exported branch

Quote:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cryptic\euCoH] "Installation Directory"="C:\\Program Files\\NCsoft\\City Of Heroes (EU)" "CurrentVersion"="2150.201111031938.1.0" "Locale"=dword:00000000 "ChecksumFileTime"=dword:4ebd68c2 "LastPiggCorruption"="2150.201111031938.1" "DriverCheckLastVersion"="2151.201111120053.1" "DriverCheckLastDate"=dword:49a5b867 "accountName"="MGawlas" "gamma"="1.000000" "fxSoundVolume"="0.600000" "musicSoundVolume"="0.600000" "voiceoverSoundVolume"="0.800000" "dontSaveName"="0" "version"="5" "screenX"="1024" "screenY"="768" "refreshRate"="60" "screenX_pos"="0" "screenY_pos"="0" "maximized"="0" "fullScreen"="1" "mipLevel"="2" "characterMipLevel"="2" "texLodBias"="2" "texAniso"="2" "worldDetailLevel"="0.800000" "entityDetailLevel"="0.798547" "shadowMode"="1" "shadowMapShowAdvanced"="0" "shadowMapShader"="0" "shadowMapSize"="0" "shadowMapDistance"="-2" "cubemapMode"="0" "buildingPlanarReflections"="0" "ageiaOn"="0" "physicsQuality"="0" "showAdvanced"="1" "graphicsQuality"="0.250000" "maxParticles"="50000" "maxParticleFill"="10.000000" "suppressCloseFx"="1" "suppressCloseFxDist"="3.000000" "forceSoftwareAudio"="0" "enableVBOs"="1" "enable3DSound"="0" "renderScaleX"="1.000000" "renderScaleY"="1.000000" "useRenderScale"="0" "shaderDetail"="5" "useWater"="0" "useBloom"="0" "useDesaturate"="1" "bloomMagnitude"="1.000000" "useDOF"="0" "dofMagnitude"="1.000000" "ambientShowAdvanced"="0" "ambientOptionScale"="0.000000" "ambientStrength"="0" "ambientResolution"="1" "ambientBlur"="3" "antiAliasing"="1" "useVSync"="1" "fancyMouseCursor"="1" "ShowLoginDialog"="0" "enableHWLights"="0" "razerMouseTray"="0" "LoadintTip"=dword:0000004c

Correction, crashes still happen - but they're a much rarer occurrence now.

Uninstalling 9.3 completely and installing 10.2 has - seemingly - caused the crashes to worsen. After installing 10.2, the crash happened immediately when talking to a contact or trying to check another player's info. I've also tested and confirmed that the crashes also occur when starting the game in safe mode.

I am now certain that this is another incarnation of the previously reported "crash on portrait display" bug - since that is the common denominator in all cases (contacts tab, player info, talking to contacts, opening my own costume selection window).