StarCraft freezes after 1-5 minutes of playing

No, I meant just playing normally since I haven't tried Chaoslauncher.

Well i've been screwing around with other apps and i believe i have proved that it is a DirectDraw wide failure in locking the primary buffer.

making use of the emulator FCEU (nes emu) i found that with double buffering enabled, (a commonly used method to offset the risk of Vsync slowing down rendering) which requires the locking of the primary frame buffer. the Windows start menu orb and taskbar buttons (those flashing the button atleast) were rendered on top of the application in fullscreen. Had the frame buffer locked properly it would not have these draw ontop.

:) the good news is that the D3D Wrapper is looking to get under Dev soon since my friend has finally gotten Win7 compatible updates for the "Tools" he uses.

Are you gonna release these "tools" for the community?

the tools.... not so much :P... the wrapper yeah, after hes got it together and forced me and Lazure through beta testing :P

Thanks for your hard work and I'm looking forward to your fix!

Yeah, I'll certainly be testing the wrapper. Currently, I resort to running these games in a virtual machine.

While the games run GREAT in the VM, they run in a tiny lil window which can be hard to see when a game is only 640x480. =p

Squall, I see that you are very busy with this issue on Microsoft Answers. Let's all vote to need an answer so that Microsoft does something! :)

Well... it looks like the issue is not DWM, rather its the windows shell itself. Applications which call for Vsync via Vblank are having the taskbar draw on topic of parts of the screen that draw black, and also does so on the classic theme.

these are also probably what causes the flickering colours, and the inability to lock the primary buffer in order to vsync.

squall leonhart said:

Well... it looks like the issue is not DWM, rather its the windows shell itself. Applications which call for Vsync via Vblank are having the taskbar draw on topic of parts of the screen that draw black, and also does so on the classic theme.

these are also probably what causes the flickering colours, and the inability to lock the primary buffer in order to vsync.

So in other words, keep XP on one machine and run SC from there? Seems my old laptop is running it perfectly with 0 interruptions so far (been a week now).

what a pain in the ass really...

I'm kind of lost by all the technical explanations but do you think there is a chance that microsoft does something about this ?