Play-Online Viewer Problem

[Iron_Wang]

Just uninstalled my old version of FFXI so I can use the Abyssea expansion I bought as the new Ultimate Edition from Steam. Download went Ok, but took me a bit remember to find my old password so I had to wait to finish log-in because it took more than three tries. Woke up this morning to log-in and now POL is popping up with an "Error Code POL-5312" which a friend list communication error. No big deal to me I pretty much never use it, right? I keep on rolling, get to the black screen when it swaps to the windowed FFXI, and suddenly "POL has stopped working correctly. Windows is searching for a solution."

Checked the version and files with the in-POL tool. Nothing there. Checked the firewall and POL and FFXI Ultimate Abyssea Edition both have access to the internet.

[RAIST]

Just uninstalled my old version of FFXI so I can use the Abyssea expansion I bought as the new Ultimate Edition from Steam. Download went Ok, but took me a bit remember to find my old password so I had to wait to finish log-in because it took more than three tries. Woke up this morning to log-in and now POL is popping up with an "Error Code POL-5312" which a friend list communication error. No big deal to me I pretty much never use it, right? I keep on rolling, get to the black screen when it swaps to the windowed FFXI, and suddenly "POL has stopped working correctly. Windows is searching for a solution."

Checked the version and files with the in-POL tool. Nothing there. Checked the firewall and POL and FFXI Ultimate Abyssea Edition both have access to the internet.

the 5312 error is most likely exactly what it said..."communication error". This could either be between the client and server (you and SE), or internal to the SE servers. When you did the uninstall, did you remove all traces of FFXI from the registry and such? It's possible you may have some pointers to outdated files that are causing an issue if you did not do a full cleanup after the uninstall.

Otherwise, could simply be local security blocking background communication. Check the logs for your security sfotware/devices, maybe bypass a router if in use and connect directly to the ISP's modem to see if port forwarding or DMZ is needed. If all that passes, then either you or your ISP needs to trace the routing to SE to find the failing segment to get someone working on restoring/bypassing the downed segment.

As for POL stopped working....that can be a number of things. Drivers (Graphics, sound, network, mouse--ANY driver) not behaving properly with FFXI (or in general), something causing the GPU to reset (overheating, driver issues, voltage issues, etc), memory access errors (bad driver, bad memory, bad clock/voltage settings in the BIOS), various issues with the CPU config (overheating, voltage/clock settings issues).....the list can go on and on. POL is known to just flake out sometimes on a lot of systems, so it's hard to patently say "this is causing the crash".

I'd focus on the communications errors first, then go forward from there. Who knows... loosing the communication could be causing an internal exception for POL itself, and nothing is actually wrong with your system. You do know for certain something weird is going on with the netwrok communications, fix the known unknowns first.