Strange freezing issue, but only with FFXI (new graphics card, driver issue?)

[jerji]

Hey all, is there any update on this? I'm losing my mind trying to figure it out and a workaround would justify many pizzas being delivered to your doorstep.

I reactivated about three months now and have been having a really terrible time with the sporadic freezes. I'm still running on XP and had a Radeon HD 5770 but, assuming the video card was the issue, I upgraded to a Radeon HD 6870 and am still having the problem.

Here's the behavior I experience under Windows XP:

My computer randomly freezes while playing FFXI. By "freeze," I mean the last image on the display remains, the mouse and keyboard become unresponsive and sometimes I get the "CD skipping" type audio artifacts. I have to reboot when this happens.

This has happened as frequently as five times in one day and as infrequently as once in three days with the game running the whole time. The fastest it's happened is about 3 minutes after rebooting and logging back into the game. It's risky for me to do just about anything in the game that requires pops since I never know when I'm going to have to reboot and I've been screwed by this several times now.

Also, it doesn't appear to be dependent on the zone or what I'm doing. I've had many freezes while bazaaring in Jeuno, freezes while fighting NMs in Abyssea, freezes in Dynamis, in my mog house, etc

Things I've tried:

- Disabling most background programs
- Closing Firefox before playing
- Disabling power saver modes
- Updating to the lastest XP patches
- Updating my video card drivers
- Cleaning out my machine and replacing the thermal compound
- Buying a new video card, as shown above
- Inspecting the motherboard for bulging or leaking capacitors (none found)
- Inspecting admin log for errors but there is no trace of this problem when it happens
- Inspecting heat sensors -- everything is running well within tolerances
- Down-clocking my machine from 9 to 6 (which makes it very sluggish)
- Replacing my PSU (another $100 down the drain due to this problem)
- Upgrading my chipset
- Hopelessly tweaking various bios settings multiple times
- Running spyware/virus detection software (spybot, adaware, AVG)
- Removing anti-virus software (AVG)
- Using different RAM entirely

The list really goes on and on-- I'm sure I've forgotten some things as I have been battling this problem for three months now. Every time I think I have a bright idea, I get slapped in the face with another extremely frustrating freeze.

If it's actually a hardware problem, then the only remaining things I have to change are the CPU and the motherboard but both are quality components and relatively new, so I'm dubious. I could also upgrade to Windows 7. But this thread and several others on the internet give me little hope that all of that trouble would actually get me anywhere.

This thread has given me the idea to try disabling most of the options in my video card settings and I'll try this next, but man, it really does seem like FFXI is at fault here. I haven't had this problem while playing other games, including The Witcher, Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 Beta. It started when playing FFXI and so far has only occurred while playing FFXI in three months time.

Any advice would be most welcome.

Thankyou.

[Dethevn]

I am also having the same problem. I took a break from FFXI 6-7 months ago and had to put up with this crashing for 2-3 months. I recently came back and I am still experiencing the crashing. I couldn't find anyone that had a similar problem back then and now I see I'm not the only one. And it only happens with FFXI too.

I also have an HD 6970 so that does appear to be the culprit.

I was wondering if anyone in this thread happened to solve it?

[Dethevn]

Hi guys,

I managed to solve this problem by reinstalling the Realtek Audio drivers using the official Realtek drivers rather than the ones that came with my motherboard.

Go to the link here: http://www.realtek.com/downloads/dow...&GetDown=false

Download the appropriate one for your version of windows and hopefully it solves it ^^

GL!

[lathos]

Hi guys,

I managed to solve this problem by reinstalling the Realtek Audio drivers using the official Realtek drivers rather than the ones that came with my motherboard.

Go to the link here: http://www.realtek.com/downloads/dow...&GetDown=false

Download the appropriate one for your version of windows and hopefully it solves it ^^

GL!

I am also having this problem and no way is it my hardware,i am going to download the realtek driver and see if that works also u can run steam as administrator and run it in vista or xp mode but that is at your own risk.Back to my point my hardware is fiiiiine i thinks its the ffxi that is outdated, and to blame my sweet baby of a machine instead of fix fatal flaws in your code shame on u SE.I play FF14 and SWTOR and BF3 for marathon hours and not 1 issue so dont give me the "It must be your pc" cuz its not its your code

[jerji]

Wow, so much time had passed that I gave up even looking at this thread.

I'm still suffering from this problem but now I'm like the abused child who just comes to accept it. Every couple of weeks, I'll have 2~3 days with no freeze, but most days it freezes multiple times. Today was three times. I've pretty much lost my mind.

Regarding the RealTek drivers, that's interesting, although one of the many things I tried while trying to debug this ridiculousness was disabling all of the onboard sound drivers on my motherboard and freezes still occurred. I got the idea that it may have something to do with sound because one of the times it froze, my sound skipped like a broken record-- but that only ever happened once out of the gajillion times that it's frozen now.

I'll give it a shot, though. Thanks!

[Igi]

Same issue here. I've got a Gigabyte HD6950. Has a solution been found for this yet?