Hard lockups - solved by window mode
 

Like others, I was having hard lockups with the game (version 1.7, multi-language). It would just freeze up with music still playing, requiring a complete hard reboot.

I tried various drivers (93.xx, 180.xx, 185.xx, 186.08 beta) for my NVIDIA 7600GT (AGP), but the same problem. Only started crashing once I'd got to Freedom Isles, but interestingly this also coincided with swapping my old SB Live! for a SB Audigy 2 ZS. System O/S is Win XP (SP3), latest DX9 etc. Prior to Freedom Isles, the game would "stutter" every 5-7 seconds in the overland map view when adventuring. Curious.

All the above have been solved by running the game in windowed mode. Still get the very occasional soft crash to desktop, but am otherwise happy.

I hope this is useful to others, including the developers.

How were you able to run it in window mode? I tried adding -window to the the shortcut but that doesn't work.

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\[USERNAME]\My Documents\My Games\Kings Bounty

Edit the file 'game.ini' in wordpad / notepad and change 'setf ~windowed 0' from '0' to '1', save the changes and fire KB up.

As a followup to the above, my problems may also have been due to overheating, which I've now also attended to. Worth trying the above, though, if you've got hard lockups.

As an aside, when I tried to revert back to full screen, it didn't seem to want to do it by simply reversing the above change, and I had to delete the whole Kings Bounty settings folder (backup up saves, of course!).