Computer crashes when hitting vehicles under WinXP

[Grim Redeemer]

First of all: I'm not completely sure if this is the right forum, please point out the right one if it isn't. Should I post in the General Tech Support instead?

My comp:
AMD Athlon XP 2500+, ATI Radeon 9600 PRO 256mb with the latest drivers, Realtek AC'97 Audio integrated on motherboard with the latest drivers, Windows XP Pro SP2

I've been playing SP:WaW on this computer since I got it in October 2003 and never had a hitch. Then just before christmas I got infected by a particularly nasty set of spy-, ad-, and malware, a bunch of trojans and a few viruses to boot. One of the side effects of these was that the computer suddenly rebooted in the course of normal operation. This is how I realized there was something seriously wrong with the computer.

Long story short, I downloaded a bunch of anti-virus/-adware/-malware/-spyware/-whatever programs and ran them and scoured the computer clean of anything suspicious. Problems went away -- mostly: now SP:WaW suffers from similar reboots when, and only when, a vehicle is fired at and hit. Specifically, it happens during or immediately after the graphics effect of the weapon hit on the vehicle, before any feedback of the hit (no sound effect gets to play, no text is shown). Once the computer has rebooted, a Windows warning pops up saying there was a "serious error" (I've got a Finnish language WinXP), and if I run the auto-report feature, it says it doesn't know exactly what the problem was but it might have something to do with some device drivers.

I'm reasonably certain it's not a sound issue, since it happens regardless of whether sound effects are on or not. No viruses or ad-/spy-/malware persist on my computer, and I've updated all the device drivers I could think of. I've uninstalled SP:WaW several times and installed different versions of it, but the problem persists.

One freaky thing aspect of the reboots: When I start up the game again after a reboot and continue playing, and again, and again, the reboots get less and less common (from reboot/5-10 hits to reboot/100 hits) -- but as soon as I take a few days' break from the game, it reboots right after a few hits.

I'd be very grateful for any hints you might have as to what might cause this and how to fix it. It's been nearly a month since I've been able to enjoy a good game of SP:WaW and I'm starting to get withdrawal symptoms.

[chief]

First things first, did you remov(delete) the infmous steel.prf file in the SAVE FOLDER ?
If not.....Do it now.

Next run the game with NOTHING running in the background, as as been stated many times "SPWAW is a modified DOS game and therefore is a memory hog" it does not like sharing with anything else running in background. Try running game without anything in background and if you really, really must have something on then bring it on one at a time till you find the culprit.
You may have the largest RAM in the world and SPwaw will still try to gobble it all up. The game is particularly jealous of firewalls and anti virus checkers, I saw where you had a problem but these do not need to be on when playing against the AI only. HTH

[Grim Redeemer]

ORIGINAL: chief

You may have the largest RAM in the world and SPwaw will still try to gobble it all up. The game is particularly jealous of firewalls and anti virus checkers, I saw where you had a problem but these do not need to be on when playing against the AI only. HTH

Well, that sure would make sense. I've currently got a total of 4 anti-virus/ware programs running in the background. I'll try what happens when I run the game without them and report back...

[Grim Redeemer]

No such luck. I ran the game several times with less processes on the background than I ever remember having (outside of the Safe Mode), it made no noticeable difference on the rate of occurrence of the reboots.

Maybe I should just stick to playing infantry-only missions, those cause no problems...

[Voriax]

You might just want to remove SPWaW completely and reinstalling. Maybe all that trouble with viruses and such caused some corruption. For example, it might be that some sound file used in vehicle hits is broken.

Voriax

[Grim Redeemer]

ORIGINAL: Voriax

You might just want to remove SPWaW completely and reinstalling. Maybe all that trouble with viruses and such caused some corruption. For example, it might be that some sound file used in vehicle hits is broken.

Voriax

I didn't mention it in my first post, but when I un- and reinstalled different versions of SP:WaW, I completely removed everything SP-related twice. So it's not that.

I'm positive it's not a particular sound file either, since it happens randomly regardless of what weapon a vehicle is hit with, what kind of vehicle it is, etc. And, like I mentioned, it happens regardless of whether the sound effects are even on. I think if a file was corrupt it would crash every time, whereas now the likelihood of it crashing is like 1/5 when I haven't played the game very recently.

Oh well, I'd come to dislike the armor-centricity of normal gameplay, so a few infantry-only battles will just feel refreshing. Teaches me to respect crew-served machineguns and cavalry again...

[chief]

Only one other question did you delete the steel.prf file in the save folder. it's also a known problem causer and the game rewrites it so deleting doesn't hurt a bit.

[Grim Redeemer]

Yeah, I deleted it when you mentioned it, before closing most of the processes on the background. Apparently that made no difference.

[IBTyrone]

ORIGINAL: Grim Redeemer

Yeah, I deleted it when you mentioned it, before closing most of the processes on the background. Apparently that made no difference.

Are you having problems in other applications? Are there other weird things happening outside of SPWAW? It sounds like it may be an issue with the underlying operating system if you have reinstalled SPWAW multiple times and it still keeps doing the same thing. Do you have the recovery CD that came with the computer? That solution is pretty drastic, though, but an OS repair/reinstall should fix whatever the spyware/viruses screwed up when they took over your computer.

[chief]

Have you tried running it (Spwaw) in the "compatibility mode" of XP ?

Have you tried an earlier version of DX9 ????? Some people have had trouble with the newest version and SPwaw.

Go to MSoft's site and check on complatibility with SP2....I left it off my XP machine and I'm having no problems whatsoever, (I don't dare add it to my setup [SP2]).

Good luck

[chief]

One more thing has come to mind, far fetched I know, are you running a very large battle sequence ??????[&:]If you have say 200 units on the field of battle, hit a tank, 5 people bail out, now you have 204 items on field (4 more than game allows) all kinds of odd things start to harpoon then......[:-]I believe my numbers are correct as a total for both sides. If I'm wrong on these numbers someone will correct me.....[:'(]to steal a comment from Fradar..."Don't blame me I'm only a Frenchman"[8|] I'll say "Don't blame me I'm getting old".......[:-]

[Grim Redeemer]

ORIGINAL: IBTyrone

Are you having problems in other applications? Are there other weird things happening outside of SPWAW? It sounds like it may be an issue with the underlying operating system if you have reinstalled SPWAW multiple times and it still keeps doing the same thing. Do you have the recovery CD that came with the computer? That solution is pretty drastic, though, but an OS repair/reinstall should fix whatever the spyware/viruses screwed up when they took over your computer.

Nope, there are no problems with any other applications, nothing weird happening anywhere else that I can think of. I briefly thought about formatting the HD and reinstalling everything, but with more than 80Gb of material that I do not have locally on a disk I'm not too fond of that idea.

ORIGINAL: chief

Have you tried running it (Spwaw) in the "compatibility mode" of XP ?

Have you tried an earlier version of DX9 ????? Some people have had trouble with the newest version and SPwaw.

Go to MSoft's site and check on complatibility with SP2....I left it off my XP machine and I'm having no problems whatsoever, (I don't dare add it to my setup [SP2]).

I've ran it in Win95, Win98 and Win2k/ME compatibility modes, no noticeable difference in rate of crashing.
I haven't tried older DirectX drivers. Anyone got a link for a good DirectX management tool/program?
The WinXP SP2 Application Compatibility Testing and Mitigation Guide is way too tech heavy for me.

Overall, I find it unlikely that it's such an obvious system-wide problem, since it appears only very, very locally.

ORIGINAL: chief

One more thing has come to mind, far fetched I know, are you running a very large battle sequence ?

Nope, this happens in all battle sizes. In fact, the longest running vehicle combat I ran was a test, and had about 100-150 armored vehicles on a completely flat map firing at each other nonstop (both sides computer controlled) with Hitting, Morale and Toughness at 250%. At best, it ran through several dozen kills (hundreds of hits) before crashing.

Yesterday I fiddled about with the sound effect files, identifying the ones before which the problem occurs (7, 456-476,699-704 i.e. all the vehicle-hit sounds, I think), and replacing them all with the menu click sounds (1.wav). There didn't seem to be a significant difference in rate of crashing, so it doesn't seem specific to the sound effects, or even to memory usage (1.wav is a whopping 22kb in size).

[jbravo]

This isn't really a new issue, I've had the exact same problem for nearly 5 years now.

I'd go along for a while and then one of my tanks takes a hit and I'm right back at my desktop. So far it's been the same on 3 different computers, 2 different operating systems and 5 different versions of DirectX.

It's not a memory issue, even at it's worst mech.exe doesn't take up even 5% of my ram and I've had it occur on the very first turn of a battle.

It's not old files or bad files, this was a completely clean install of 8.2 and the 8.3 patch on a WinXP - SP1 install less than a week old.

Oh well, as much as I love the game I can't bring myself to play it with a 20% chance of a CTD every turn for my moderately sized tank battles, it got too annoying after the first couple of years of putting up with it. So I'll just delete it again and wait for the next version, trying not to get my hopes up as I've done with every version since 4.0.

[Wild Bill]

This is really mysterious to me too, fellas. I wish I had a quick answer. The guys seem to have covered all that I can think of that might cure the problem.

As with most problems, it is a matter of the process of elimination. It has to be the (1) the game itself, (2) some error in the installation, (3) compatibility with other programs on the computer.

It pretty much has to be confined to these areas.

Questions:

1. Has it always done this, since you first installed it, or did it start occurring sometime afterward?

2. Have you tried shutting down any other programs that are unneccessary in your startup program. You can restart them when you finish. I don't think this is it. IF that were the case, the game would not run at all. Also do not have any other programs running when you are in the game.

3. Is your only problem with vehicles? What kind? Tanks, trucks, AFVs? Or all of them? Any particular country, or all of them? What kind of attacking or defending fire are being used against them, infantry antitank, other tanks, artillery, aircraft?

4. Have you loaded in ServicePack #2 of WindowsXP. It includes certain safeguards against computer encroachment that crippled some of my games and I had to remove it. Now they work fine.

5. Do you have this problem with any other games when you play them? Do you have other versions of Steel Panthers that you play? Do they work?

7. Are these computer generated battles or scenarios designed by individuals? DOes it happen in campaign play or just scenarios? Is it all scenarios or some of them? Which scenarios give you problems? Can you name them for me?

8. As some of you know, I've been involved with this system since 1994 as a playtester for SSI when the first Steel Panthers came out. It was originally designed as a "tank game." We have found, however, with time and some modification that now it serves just as well or even better as an infantry game with tanks generally in a support role.

9. Do me a favor. Crank up a scenario. After arriving at turn one but BEFORE you make a single move or fire, save it. Send the save to me. Let me try it on my computer. If I don't have that problem then we have eliminated a number of possibilities.

Send it to: bwilder@bellsouth.net

Send me your e-mail address. I'll try your battle and see what happens to me when I fire at a tank.

Tell you what. Unless you have a particular one you want to try, use scenario 031, Blenheim Blunder. It is primarily a tank action. Start it, get to turn one, save it before moving or firing, zip it up in its save format and send it to me.

Standing by....Wild Bill

[jbravo]

ORIGINAL: Wild Bill

This is really mysterious to me too, fellas. I wish I had a quick answer. The guys seem to have covered all that I can think of that might cure the problem.

As with most problems, it is a matter of the process of elimination. It has to be the (1) the game itself, (2) some error in the installation, (3) compatibility with other programs on the computer.

It pretty much has to be confined to these areas.

Questions:

1. Has it always done this, since you first installed it, or did it start occurring sometime afterward?

From as soon as I install it, from a fresh XP1 install (SP2), I got to play about 2 turns of a WW2 Campaign scenario before it happened again.

2. Have you tried shutting down any other programs that are unneccessary in your startup program. You can restart them when you finish. I don't think this is it. IF that were the case, the game would not run at all. Also do not have any other programs running when you are in the game.

Nothing unusual in the background, certainly nothing that's been constant over the whole time I've been playing.

3. Is your only problem with vehicles? What kind? Tanks, trucks, AFVs? Or all of them? Any particular country, or all of them? What kind of attacking or defending fire are being used against them, infantry antitank, other tanks, artillery, aircraft?

Just tanks, I hear the hit sound and right back to desktop. I haven't done specific tests but I can't remember it happening against anything but a hit which could kill the vehicle. Rifle and machinegun rounds aren't triggering it.

4. Have you loaded in ServicePack #2 of WindowsXP. It includes certain safeguards against computer encroachment that crippled some of my games and I had to remove it. Now they work fine.

No SP2, I even had this problem under Win98.

5. Do you have this problem with any other games when you play them? Do you have other versions of Steel Panthers that you play? Do they work?

No other problems with any other games. This is the only Steel Panthers that I've played.

7. Are these computer generated battles or scenarios designed by individuals? DOes it happen in campaign play or just scenarios? Is it all scenarios or some of them? Which scenarios give you problems? Can you name them for me?

I play the WW2 campaign almost exclusively.

9. Do me a favor. Crank up a scenario. After arriving at turn one but BEFORE you make a single move or fire, save it. Send the save to me. Let me try it on my computer. If I don't have that problem then we have eliminated a number of possibilities.

The real problem is that it's not reproducible, it's random and infrequent for any given hit, reloading a save means it won't happen again on any particular attack, even if the first attack after the reload triggers it.

Send it to: bwilder@bellsouth.net

Will do, I wish I could narrow it down better.

Send me your e-mail address. I'll try your battle and see what happens to me when I fire at a tank.

Tell you what. Unless you have a particular one you want to try, use scenario 031, Blenheim Blunder. It is primarily a tank action. Start it, get to turn one, save it before moving or firing, zip it up in its save format and send it to me.

Standing by....Wild Bill

[KG Erwin]

The CTD is a memory issue. I did an experiment with the opening music. I replaced the 4mb track with a track that was 32mb. The game wouldn't even start--all I got was a black screen. So, this leads me to believe that the mech.exe in SPWaW is the culprit--it sucks up resources for any PC it's played on, no matter how powerful. The only suggested answer is shutting down all unccessary background applications.

I will note this-- my old Win98 machine had NO problems running SPWaW. So far, my new WinXP machine hasn't had any problems, other than the one listed above.

[Wild Bill]

Thanks for the info. Go ahead and try to save one. Of course you can't save it after it crashes. What you might do is start a battle, keep saving each turn as you go until it crashes. Then send me the turn prior to your crash.

Some more question...is it a particular nationality? Does it happen on either side? Is it a particular tank that does this? You said MG and rifle fire are not a problem. What kind of fire usually causes this? Is it another tank or an antitank weapon?

One more thing, look in the SPWAW directory and tell me the date of your mech.exe file, please.

Wild Bill

[Wild Bill]

Waiting for your reply my friend and we'll do what we can to fix it...WB

[Grim Redeemer]

It appears there are some differences between the trouble jbravo is having and what I'm going through. The following only describes my problem. (Quotes are Wild Bill's.)

1. Has it always done this, since you first installed it, or did it start occurring sometime afterward?

The short version: started occurring some time afterward. The long version is in the first message of this thread.

2. Have you tried shutting down any other programs that are unneccessary in your startup program. You can restart them when you finish. I don't think this is it. IF that were the case, the game would not run at all. Also do not have any other programs running when you are in the game.

I have tried shutting down every program I can shut down without compromising system stability. This made no difference whatsoever to the rate of crashes.

3. Is your only problem with vehicles? What kind? Tanks, trucks, AFVs? Or all of them? Any particular country, or all of them? What kind of attacking or defending fire are being used against them, infantry antitank, other tanks, artillery, aircraft?

I must admit I haven't tried this on aircraft, but the crashes occur when any weapon (small arms, cannons, etc.) hits any kind of land or sea vehicle. The kind of vehicle or kind of weapon attacking do not seem to make any difference in the rate of crashes.

4. Have you loaded in ServicePack #2 of WindowsXP. It includes certain safeguards against computer encroachment that crippled some of my games and I had to remove it. Now they work fine.

I installed SP2 right around the time the trouble started, but the crashes started occurring before I installed SP2. Uninstalling SP2 on this computer is not really an option, unfortunately, so I cannot properly test whether it's got something to do with it.

5. Do you have this problem with any other games when you play them? Do you have other versions of Steel Panthers that you play? Do they work?

This is the only game I have the problem with. I don't have Steel Panthers 1/2/3 so I cannot test them. The problem does occur just as often in all versions of SP:WaW, however, back down to 4.5.

7. Are these computer generated battles or scenarios designed by individuals? DOes it happen in campaign play or just scenarios? Is it all scenarios or some of them? Which scenarios give you problems? Can you name them for me?

For me, the problem is completely unrelated to the battle in which the hit on a vehicle occurs. It happens just as often in massive campaigns as it does in self-created 1-vs-1 halftrack duels on completely flat terrain.

Some more question...is it a particular nationality? Does it happen on either side?

Happens for every nationality, on any side.

As for jbravo, the crashes are seemingly random, they cannot be reproduced reliably other than by the logic that any battle where weapons are fired at vehicles there's bound to be a crash sooner or later.

One more thing, look in the SPWAW directory and tell me the date of your mech.exe file, please.

For my current installation, the MECH.EXE was created January 2nd 2004 @ 23:52:28, last modified April 2nd 2004 @ 22:27:38 -- no clue whether that's my time (EET).

[minefield]

Try changing your video driver.