Thank you. It is hard to troubleshoot. I decided to try one thing before I moved on, a fresh hdd format then optimize hdd and install all the expansion data and update it all at once. This seems to have done the trick. Everything is much better now. framrate stutter is gone no weird crashes, everything runs much better, even logged out in different areas I had trouble with and it works great, for the ps2 version anyway. I'm guessing either the original data on the hdd was corrupt and or the update corrupted the data somehow as wipeing the original data and starting over worked. What's interesting is on the previous install I could never figure out how to release the Trust NPC, but now on the new install there is a release menu item that wasn't there before. Obviously something didn't update correctly, lol.