Crash on starting a Campaign

[Suraknar]

Alright, have been trying to fix this for the past 2 days.

Whenever I would click the button to start a new Grand Campaign, the screen would go White, and I would get an Exception which would result in the game crashing, or a memory Dump that would cause my system to restart.

Uninstalled the game via Steam and reinstalled, and would not fix the issue.

(I noticed a problem here this time, after the game installed Steam started updating it, but the final installation screen has the check to launch the game, so the game did try to launch with the updating being at 34%, it may have corrupted some files)

Nevertheless, I started thinking drivers issue (or worse Video Card issues), so Updated Nvidia Drivers from Asus (not from Nvidia), and also got the latest DirectX 9c (November 2008 edition), as I am running WinXP SP3.

Then reinstalled the game a third time.

Low and behold, the crash happened again, I was out of options.

Finally it hit me to try to clear the preferences file under Documents and Settings\(Your Profile)\Application Data\The Creative assembly\Empire\Scripts\ and renamed the Preferences.empire_script.txt to Preferences.empire_scripts.bak and started the game, Also deleted Saved Game Files too, both of which do not get removed when you uninstall the game with steam, this time all worked nicely.

I also did notice a more fluid performance, most possibly due to the updated Drivers and DirectX.

Just thought to share this here for anyone else that may have experienced this.


Event viewer data:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Faulting application empire.exe, version 1.0.0.0, faulting module empire.exe, version 1.0.0.0, fault address 0x008037cc.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 65 6d 70 ure emp
0018: 69 72 65 2e 65 78 65 20 ire.exe
0020: 31 2e 30 2e 30 2e 30 20 1.0.0.0
0028: 69 6e 20 65 6d 70 69 72 in empir
0030: 65 2e 65 78 65 20 31 2e e.exe 1.
0038: 30 2e 30 2e 30 20 61 74 0.0.0 at
0040: 20 6f 66 66 73 65 74 20 offset
0048: 30 30 38 30 33 37 63 63 008037cc
0050: 0d 0a ..

System Specs:

WINXP SP3
AMD Phenom 3X 2.4 Ghz
4 Gig of DDR2 1066 Mgz RAM
Nvidia 9600 GT 512 DDR3 1800 Mgz VRAM
EIDE HDDs. (I know they slow going SATA soon).

Cheers!