Game Locks Doing Basic Actions

I have been having great deal of trouble with crashing recently. The game freezes and becomes completely unresponsive when doing a number of very basic actions.

1. When exiting the game to desktop, it will crash if I hit "Exit Now" or when the 30 second timer runs out, and I am forced to use the task manager to end the process.

2. When I bring up my costumes on any character, it will lock and I can only exit through the Windows Task Manager.

3. When I change any sort of graphics settings, the game locks and, again, I have to quite via the Windows Task manager.

It has only been happening the past few weeks and otherwise the game has been running fantastically on this computer for nearly 5 years.

I used CoH helper and got the following information:

DxDiag gathered at January 23, 2012 23:21 (-05:00)
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.111025-1629)
System Manufacturer: System manufacturer
System Model: System Product Name
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Central Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~3.0GHz
Memory: 3582MB
.Net Memory Report: 1944MB out of 3582MB available
Page File: 4064MB (1399MB currently in use)
C Drive: (SAMSUNG HD501LJ) 33470MB out of 476929MB (7%) free
E Drive: (TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S183L) 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: Plug and Play Monitor
Monitor's Max Resolution: 1600,1200
Video Device Name: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
Manufacturer / Chip: NVIDIA / GeForce 8800 GTX
Video Memory: 768.0 MB
Driver Version: 6.14.0012.8558
Driver Date: 10/7/2011 11:50:00 PM
Driver Language: English

Sound Device Description: SoundMAX HD Audio
Driver File: ADIHdAud.sys
Driver Version: 5.10.0001.4530
Driver Date: 5/2/2006 4:12:00 PM


WMI Information
Motherboard Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Motherboard Model: (empty)
Motherboard Product: M2N-SLI DELUXE
Motherboard Version: 1.XX
BIOS Manufacturer: Phoenix Technologies, LTD
BIOS Name: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
BIOS Version: Nvidia - 42302e31
BIOS Release: 20070103000000.000000+000


Registry Information for Current User
Resolution: 1920x1200
3D Resolution: 1920x1200 (Not using renderscale)
Full Screen: Yes
Maximized: No
Screen Position: 0, 0
Refresh Rate: 60Hz
Vertical Sync Enabled: Yes


Physics Quality: Medium
Maximum Particles: 50000
Max Particle Fill? 10.000
Physics Card Enabled: No


Anti-aliasing: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: 4x
Texture LOD Bias: Smooth
Water Effects: Medium quality
Bloom: 1.000 (turned on)
Depth of Field Enabled: Yes
Desaturation Effects (Sepia) Enabled: Yes
Shader Detail: Medium?


World Texture Level: Very High
Character Texture Level: High
World Detail Level (Vis_Scale): 1.000
Entity Detail Level: 1.000
Shadows Enabled: Yes
Shadow Mode: Stencil shadows
Shadow Map Shader: Unknown (0)
Environmental Reflections: Disabled
Advanced Occlusion Settings: No
Ambient Occlusion: Off
Occlusion Strength: Off
Blur: Bilateral
Ambient Resolution: Performance


Gamma Correction: 0.880
Geometry Buffers (VBOs) Enabled: Yes
Suppression of FX When Camera Close Enabled: No
Close Suppression Range: 3.000
Show Advertisements: Yes

Audio Mode: Performance
3D Audio: No
FX Sound Volume: 0.151
Music Sound Volume: 0.198

Show Advanced Graphics Options: No
Overall Graphics Quality: 0.500
Reverse Mouse Buttons: No
Save Login Username: Yes
Transfer Rate: 956325 bytes/second
Current Game Version: 1950.201102120907.1
Installation Directory: C:\Program Files\City of Heroes

Mod files in the Data directory
.\texture_library\MAPS\city has 1 file
.\texture_library\MAPS\Midnight_Squad has 1 file
.\texture_library\MAPS\Safeguard has 9 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\sewers has 44 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\static has 40 files
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\City has 1 file
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\Outdoor_Missions has 9 files
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\Static has 16 files


If anyone is able to shed some light on this problem it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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Your hard drive is really really full (7% free). It's likely that the game files are extremely fragmented and may be affecting performance to the point of instability or at the very least very slow disk access. Even windows gets a little cranky once you drop below 15% free. I use Auslogics Disk Defrag, it's quicker than the Windows one and you can choose just to defrag a folder. I would also look into using CCleaner to tidy up before running a defrag.

Would like to see a Hijack This report to see what stuff you have loaded in the background. Also did you run the CoHHelper with the game or other memory hogging app loaded because using 1.5GB of memory with just a browser up in XP seems high.

Graphic settings look reasonable.

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