If you are having random General Protection Faults, Blue Screens of Death and/or reboots while playing RO, I would suggest you try the following FIRST:
Run a good memory tester on your system!! I would suggest MemTest86+ or the original MemTest86 from http://www.memtest.org/ or http://www.memtest86.com/.
I'd been having issues recently running RO and receiving random GPF's, BSOD's and reboots myself. Most of the BSOD errors have been STOP 0x0000008E errors occuring with different modules, but particularly with nv4_disp.dll (Nvidia display driver file.) I followed the troubleshooting documentation provided here with no success... uninstalling and reinstalling my video drivers helped a little, but not much. Renaming the redorchestra.ini & user.ini files and validating the cache resolved the GPF issues I was having, but I was still getting Blue Screens.
Running a memory test however, I found that my memory module had gone bad. I've been running a clean install of WinXP SP2 for about 8 months with no problems with RO or any other games, but it turns out the module had issues around the 510 MB range (it's a 1 GB stick). I had tested a couple other games that had worked previously and had experienced crashes and BSOD's with them before running the memory test, which clued me in this wasn't just an issue with RO.
So what was really happening was the bad RAM was causing crashes with RO, as well as corrupting the video driver files and RO files as well. I bought the memory module probably close to 2 years ago now, and had experienced no issues with it, but this does show that memory CAN go bad over time. I hope this information might help someone troubleshooting issues with RO and general game crashes.
By the way, sometimes Windows XP has duplicate device drivers (particularly for display adapaters & monitors) that do not normally show up in Device Manager. Please refer to the article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315539/en-us for information on how to display "ghost" or "phantom" device drivers so you can uninstall them all so you can get a clean reinstall of your video drivers. Duplicated device drivers can also cause all sorts of problems and errors in Windows!
Good luck!
Res
Run a good memory tester on your system!! I would suggest MemTest86+ or the original MemTest86 from http://www.memtest.org/ or http://www.memtest86.com/.
I'd been having issues recently running RO and receiving random GPF's, BSOD's and reboots myself. Most of the BSOD errors have been STOP 0x0000008E errors occuring with different modules, but particularly with nv4_disp.dll (Nvidia display driver file.) I followed the troubleshooting documentation provided here with no success... uninstalling and reinstalling my video drivers helped a little, but not much. Renaming the redorchestra.ini & user.ini files and validating the cache resolved the GPF issues I was having, but I was still getting Blue Screens.
Running a memory test however, I found that my memory module had gone bad. I've been running a clean install of WinXP SP2 for about 8 months with no problems with RO or any other games, but it turns out the module had issues around the 510 MB range (it's a 1 GB stick). I had tested a couple other games that had worked previously and had experienced crashes and BSOD's with them before running the memory test, which clued me in this wasn't just an issue with RO.
So what was really happening was the bad RAM was causing crashes with RO, as well as corrupting the video driver files and RO files as well. I bought the memory module probably close to 2 years ago now, and had experienced no issues with it, but this does show that memory CAN go bad over time. I hope this information might help someone troubleshooting issues with RO and general game crashes.
By the way, sometimes Windows XP has duplicate device drivers (particularly for display adapaters & monitors) that do not normally show up in Device Manager. Please refer to the article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315539/en-us for information on how to display "ghost" or "phantom" device drivers so you can uninstall them all so you can get a clean reinstall of your video drivers. Duplicated device drivers can also cause all sorts of problems and errors in Windows!
Good luck!
Res
raw <- UWindowsViewport::Repaint <- UWindowsClient::Tick <- ClientTick <- UGameEngine::Tick <- Level Untitled <- UpdateWorld <- MainLoop <- FMallocWindows::Free <- FMallocWindows::Realloc <- 4C576C61 0 FArray <- FArray::Realloc <- 0*2 <- FMallocWindows::Free
