Hard lockups - solved by window mode

[kiwiguy]

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.