Steam: Lockup, forced to restart computer

[Hypatian]

I've been having the same problem, and I've never run any version of the game but 1.7, which I installed via Steam. Sometimes I can go a while without a lockup, but sometimes it happens very quickly. It's happened in every area I've visited so far (around the starting castle, to the east and west), both in and out of combat.

I'm running Vista 64 Home Premium SP1 on a quad core Intel Core 2 with 4GB of memory, graphics card is a 512MB GeForce 9800 GTX. All of my drivers are up to date--I upgraded them when I began having this issue, and the problem has not gone away.

I'm somewhat surprised that it's causing such a hard lockup, since my experience with most games in Vista has been that the system restarts the video driver and recovers in the rare case that something goes horribly wrong.

I'm really liking this game, but the locking up makes it pretty much impossible to play. Even when I save after every battle, periodically rebooting and restarting the game is a bit much.

[Houdani]

Ditto, same problem here.

Bought from Steam on 3 May 09. Crashes every 10 minutes or less. Entire computer freezes and requires a hard reset to recover. Am unable to ALT+TAB or ALT+F4 or CTRL+ALT+DEL to escape the game.

So far, it's only been happening outside of combat. It seems to freeze most often when there is a dialog window open such as when I pick up loose gold on the map or when talking to a vendor/quest giver.

I first thought it was related to overheating my video card, but I manually set all fans in my rig to 100% (case, CPU, GPU) and the problem did not go away.

I have not encountered any crashes like this in any other game.

System Specs:
WinXP Home SP3
AMD Athlon 64 XP 4400+ socket 939 @ stock speeds
2GB DDR RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT
Shuttle SN25P case (with their custom power supply and motherboard)
On board audio with Via Envy24 codec

Yeah, I know. It's way past time to upgrade.

[Hypatian]

Aha!

I remembered last night just before I was going to bed that I had a similar lockup problem to this when I attempted to run World of Warcraft under Steam to get the Steam in-game overlay.

Today I'm playing with defaults settings, but the Steam overlay disabled in Steam config. It seems to be working so far with no mishaps. I will report back later this evening and let you know if it's still working.

[Hypatian]

Update: Nope. It lasted a good long while, but finally locked up in the usual way while I was in the middle of targeting an evil shoal. Bleah.

[duh]

Suggested Fix:

Re-release patch 1.6.5 as patch 1.7.1 (steam only) and send that to the people at steam.

[duh]

I downloaded a cracked version (dont get mad, i did this only after the version i paid for wouldnt work) And I experienced the same problem, it was patched to 1.6. Im thinking the problem isnt with steam or the 1.7 patch, but rather with the games own CD authentication, whatever steam is doing to bypass it isnt working.

System Specs:

Vista 32bit
Foxconn g33m motherboard
Intel e8400 3.0ghz
4gb 667mhz ddr2 ram
Nvidia 8600 256mb

[Houdani]

Originally Posted by Hypatian

Update: Nope. It lasted a good long while, but finally locked up in the usual way while I was in the middle of targeting an evil shoal. Bleah.

Ditto. Tried the same and was met with more computer locking fun.

As an addendum, I'm now locking up in all areas of the game. In and out of combat, with or without dialog boxes on screen. Phooey.

[kelderos]

Seems like a few people are having this problem, any official word?

[Hypatian]

My latest attempted settings change was to disable Threaded Optimization on my nVidia driver for KB. No crashes yet, but I did have one graphical glitch (flickery icons floating above things) and immediately restarted the game. Can't ever prove a negative, but it's worth a try. I'll of course report back if I do crash later, but I have some other things to do right now.