Starcraft System Crash

KnowledgeWorker said:

As I think I said already

deactivating Aero

does solve the problem once and for all.
That is indeed also the reason the problem is also occuring already in Vista.

No, the problem did not occur in Vista. I was running Vista for a year without the problem in Aero and once I switched to Win 7 on the same machine I ran into it. I'm not running Win 7 any more so I don't know if switching Aero off fixes it but I suspect not.

StarCraft runs fine on Windows 7.

just to clarify - i had the same freezing issues and updating to the latest nforce and nvidia drivers and disabling skype while playing has helped. the problem has not occured in vista once - so it's not vista related. it's also not a hardware issue, since i have no problems when i disable skype and any media player in the background.

StevenBonnellII said:

Hello! I believe I am having the same problem you all are having.

I can play SC:BW for HOURS, or, maybe only for five minutes, and then my screen jars and I get this disgusting freeze that is impossible to escape from, no alt-tabs, no alt f4's, no nothing. It almost seems like a hardware crash.

I believe I am a little closer to the solutions, though, than most...

I had Windows XP SP2 x86, and I was having these problems. Well, I upgraded from XP SP2 to Windows 7 x64. A COMPLETELY new OS with a different architecture (32 to 64bit).

I STILL have these problems!

I believe that means it -MUST- be hardware related, there's no way around it! ALSO...One of times my computer screen froze, I hard-rebooted and then my monitor had a bunch of weird numbers/characters on it - my graphics card got fried!

One GFX later, I'm still having the same problems!

What kind of mobo are you guys using? I have a P5N-E SLI ASUS board.

My AIM name is Wing Neo Star 15, maybe it'd be easier to talk there, otherwise respond here if you have any good info!

It's not software related.

KnowledgeWorker said:

As I think I said already

deactivating Aero

does solve the problem once and for all.
That is indeed also the reason the problem is also occuring already in Vista.

Still crashing

Its not hardware related. Its entirely a issue within Windows 7.
The fixes that worked on Vista are not working on Windows 7 at all.

A friend of mine that was working on an app to fix the colour issues (by pausing the explorer thread on start and unpausing on exit) is able to reproduce the issues in most of his DirectDraw games, Warcraft 2 BNE, Starcraft, Age of empires, Fallout, Worms,

Others have reproduced these problems on RCT and Pharaoh.

The issues did not occur under XP or Vista to the extent they are under Windows 7.

BTW, the colour fixer has been (or will be) released in a short while. unfortunately my friend has gone back to XP as it runs all these games fine.

Affinity does not fix it
disabling DWM does not fix it.
Uninstalling drivers does not fix it
Compatibility options do not fix it.

It seems that the issues are caused by Race issues created when Microsoft added WDDM updates to DirectDraw overlay.

I've got fraps running.

.....the possibility of a Race issue increases xD.

Further still, it could be a context locking issue where the game loses focus for a second and the api hard crashes without unlocking the input and display.

App is now at http://mudlord.xtemu.com/proj/dfddraw.zip

you can either invoke manually, or add games (upper/lower case match required) to the games.txt and it will pause explorer threads itself.

squall leonhart said:

I've got fraps running.

.....the possibility of a Race issue increases xD.

Further still, it could be a context locking issue where the game loses focus for a second and the api hard crashes without unlocking the input and display.

App is now at http://mudlord.xtemu.com/proj/dfddraw.zip

you can either invoke manually, or add games (upper/lower case match required) to the games.txt and it will pause explorer threads itself.

Did you not read my posts at all..?