Game freezes after few minutes

[krako]

Ladies and gentlemen,

unfortunately, my copy of King's Bounty is absolutely unplayable due to an freezing error which occurs after 1-2 min of gameplay. The music continues to play, but everything else is completey frozen, making a hard-reset of the computer necessary.
Even in the two minutes before freezing, sometimes graphical glitches are visible, like flickering and ghosting.

Configuration:
- Kings Bounty, German Version, patched to 1.7
- Windows Vista 64
- 8 GB Ram, Nvidia 9600 GT (2560x1600), onboard Realtek sound.

What I tried, to no avail:
- Windows' Compatibility Modes
- Updating every driver in the system, incl. Direct X
- Multi / Single display
- Messing with ini file
- Running kb.exe as admin

Please deliver an solution to this asap.


An extremely frustrated and embarrassed costumer.

[FarAway Sooner]

Noob here, but I thought I'd share, having just bought the game this weekend after playing the Demo for a week or two.

I had the same problem--game locks up after 2-4 minutes, music keeps playing, but the computer doesn't respond otherwise and I have no option but a hard power down. Very frustrating.

So I downloaded the DirectX 9.0c drivers, as recommended, but that didn't fix it. Deinstalled King's Bounty, reinstalled (from GamersGate again), tried playing without the patch, still got the problem.

So I decided to roll back to the previous Nvidia driver--I went back to 178.24, after having recently installed the 181.20 drivers for 32-bit Vista.

And, voila! The game played fine. It gave me a CTD after about two hours of playing (I'm hoping that patching it might have fixed that), but it no longer gave the results identical to what we both experienced--and I definitely reproduced mine 5-8 times before I finally solved it.

I've seen a few similar complaints to this one over the last two pages, and all of them seem to be recent--suggesting maybe something about the game doesn't sit real well w/the very latest Nvidia drivers for 32-bit windows Vista? (I'm running an 8800 GTS 320MB GPU)

I'm happy to supply more specs if it's of interest, but I'd suggest checking your Nvidia driver and see what you're running? It might have just been coincidence with me, but I don't think so.

[FarAway Sooner]

Just as an update, nVidia released v 181.22, a newer 181.version driver on 1/22/09, and I tried applying it. The game no longer crashed, but would often pause for 5 to 10 seconds, and still seemed generally unstable. I again rolled back 178.24 and the problem went away.

Additional info is available if anybody wants it.

[FarAway Sooner]

*Sigh*

I ran into the same problem with the latest driver from Nvidia (182.0. It's a good game, but if these guys make me choose between ever playing their game again, or even updating my video drivers again, I think I know who's going to lose.

[Antonius]

I have the same issue and I tried old and new drivers and they all did the same thing.