An 'Interesting' Technical Problem

I've been hooked on M:TW for a good three years now (and before that, S:TW), but I had to stop playing when my laptop finally died.

Now I've got myself a shiny new desktop, and it didn't take me too long before I'd installed M:TW and VI (including the 2.1 patch). But I have a strange problem...

Every time I try to start a new campaign, it will proceed to the loading screen, appear to load, and then crash to the desktop. When I try to start a campaign again a few seconds later, it all works fine.

I've only tried Viking era campaigns so far, but it's happened every time - I'll let you know what happens with the other periods!

But any idea what could be causing this? Anybody else suffered the same problem?

I know it's not exactly the end of the world - I've had no problems starting campaigns on the second attempt. But it does seem a little odd...

what video card do you have? Because there is a massive problem with some Nvidia drivers that causes random crashes like that. Also, do random/custom battles still work?

There is definitely a known issue with the latest version of DirectX (10.xx I believe) and CERTAIN versions of Nvidia drivers.

many people have had very good results by rolling back their Nvidia Drivers to an earlier version (including me, on my previous machine, I had to roll back my drivers to 5.something IIRC)- if you do search on the forums for Nvidia and CTD - you will probabably find more information about it than you really wanted to know..
*grin*

Good luck

DE

Well, it seems to be occuring when the screen changes from the loading screen to the campaign map (had it whilst trying to load a save just now).

I'm running and nvidia GeForce 6800 on DX9.0c.

I really don't feel like rolling my drivers back right now - for every problem that solves, it seems to create two more!

that was exactly the problem I had - when rolled back the drivers - boom - suddenly I could play the campaign games...

DE

Zild, if you can successfully figure out this problem, let me know. I have a 6200 and it won't let me use older drivers that will work with the game.

To be honest, I'm not going to try to fix it unless it becomes very bad. But if I do, and if by some miracle I succeed, I'll let you know!

I've begun thinking that another difficulty I've had may be related to this, although it's a problem I recalling having on my old laptop too...

A game of mine (2.1, Viking Era again) crashed out many many years into it. I've reloaded from the last auto-save about 5 times, but every time it'll CTD again after a few minutes. The times I remember it was whilst just bumming around the campaign map - clicking (or was it right-clicking) on Cerniu prompted at least two of the crashes!

The sholw problem of reloading from autosaves is something I recall from my old system.

Anybody experienced something similar? Think the two are related? (If so, I'll have much more reason to try fixing it!)