New
#1
32b XP game runs - only intermittently
After migrating from XP SP3 (32bit) and getting used to Win7 Ultimate (64bit), I finally got around to installing some older programs. One game in particular is giving me some trouble and I am hoping someone can point me to a possible solution.
When initially installed, the game crashed and burned. So I found out that I had to manually regedit its key into Wow6432Node. From web forums, I found that others have done so on their 64bit Win7 machines, and they have been successful in getting the game to work.
Once the key was added in my registry, the game started up and ran fine - Once. After quitting out of the game, I tried to restart it and it would not start. After several more tries, it started working again. Once. Then stopped again. So I fiddled with different permutations of the following:
- Run compatibility under XP SP3
- Run compatibility under XP SP2
- Run as administrator
The result was the same. Sometimes it works, just once. And then stops working again for several more tries. Sometimes, after I start task manager, game starts up. But subsequent times, it fails. I cannot consistently get it to start.
When it fails, most of the time a message box pops up that the game "has stopped working. Windows is collecting more info" ... "Do you want to send ?"
Poking into the resulting XML error logs, I see references to ntdll.dll and d3d9.dll. Not really sure if this information is useful.
A few times, when it fails, the game process just stops and disappears in Task Man. I don't even get the courtesy of an error notice.
This is really vexing. Not sure why the game would only work intermittently. One would think that if it runs, it should run until something signiifcant changes in the OS. But in my case, it would run once, but not again even with no changes to the OS. The worst part is that I cannot consistently repro the conditions under which it does run.
At this point, I have installed XP Mode to be able to run this game. But XP Mode is a full blown XP installation inside a VM so it has a HUGE resource footprint. I want to uninstall it.
Therefore if someone can suggest ways to make this game run under Win7, it would be much appreciated.