Zero Hour lag and crash

[Plok 327]

My dad reported that when he was playing Zero Hour last time on a map with 3 AIs, the game gradually began to slow down, and then completely crashed, leading to the well known "This is either a virus or your PC sucks" message that gives simply no info.

 

The slowdowns are also usual, but last less than a second and occur in short succession when there's a lot of units on the map. My rig is: Win XP SP3, 2.6 GHz dual-core processor by Intel, ATi Radeon X1550 series, 2 GB RAM.

 

Crash dump:

 

Release Crash at Fri Mar 09 20:45:50 2012
; Reason Uncaught Exception in GameEngine::update

Last error:
Exception is access violation
WinMain at 401700
Error code: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
Description: The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access.
Access address:00000064 was read from.

Stack Dump:
 <Unknown>(-1) : <Unknown> 0x005D4A13

Details:
Register dump...
Eip:005D4A13    Esp:0013F9F4    Ebp:00000001
Eax:00000000    Ebx:154502E4    Ecx:154502C4
Edx:00000000    Esi:154502C4    Edi:154502C4
EFlags:00010246
CS:001b  SS:0023  DS:0023  ES:0023  FS:003b  GS:0000
EIP bytes dump...

Bytes at CS:EIP (005D4A13)  : 8B 4A 64 74 65 83 78 08 17 75 5F 39 8E 98 01 00 00 75 28 8A 86 F4 01 00 00 84 C0 0F 84 D3 01 00


Current stack:

 

 

Any ideas?

[PurpleGaga27 40]

That's unusual. Have you disabled the anti-virus and firewall programs as well as activating Game Booster?

[Plok 327]

Antivirus: Microsoft Security Essentials. Pretty silent - always has been.

Firewall: Comodo Firewall - although it's paranoid as hell, it doesn't do anything harmful during gameplay.

Gamebooster: Haven't tried running ZH with it, but I also think I shouldn't need it for a game that was made in 2003.

[CraftManiac 1]

This might help: http://www.cnclabs.com/forums/default.aspx?g=posts&t=9564

 

I've looked around, googled the errors that occured and found that. It mentions the same error.

[Plok 327]

Yes, might try the .ini file editing. All else is too general.

Thanks

[Doctor Destiny 41]

ZH has a nasty habit of just crashing out of nowhere. That generally happens when your hardware is just unable to keep going. I suffered the same crashes on my last two PCs and they ran similar hardware to yours.

 

If it happens on my current rig, it's just an issue with ZH itself. Likely, even on here, I'm going to see stupid bull****.

[Plok 327]

Now that was inspiring.

[Doctor Destiny 41]

It's an unfortunate fact of Zero Hour. The problem is usually on bigger maps when the game just flat chugs because there's so much going on.

[Plok 327]

But they're stock maps, not custom

[Doctor Destiny 41]

It doesn't matter. I have it happen on any map at any time. Usually it's only when you have 3 or more AIs present on a map.

[Galacticruler 0]

odd....i have a 10 year old pc and it only ever lags(well....it crashes on start up if i forget to remove contra 007 before launching shockwave, but thats normal, also it crashes if i exit a 2nd match on a mod, always 100% of the time.) because of unit spam from AI on custom maps(my understanding of it is that the AI cant find a path to my/anothe AI's base and just turtles.)