Please help! Cannot play FFXIV and out of solutions!

I have reinstalled FFXIV 3 times and all 3 times reinstalled Windows 7...

I update FFXIV just fine via the launcher. But when I click the play button I immediately get this message:

ffxiv.exe - Bad Image

c:/Windows\system32\XINPUT1_3.dll is either not designed to run on Windows or it contains an error. Try installing the program again using the original installation media or contact your system administrator or the software vendor for support.


I tried installing latest versions of DX, nothing worked...
I have all the latest drivers for all peripherals....
I am running Win7 64bit Home Premium...I never had this problem before I did I clean install of my system. Any help is appreciated as I have exhausted all options.

There is an easy fix to this:

First go to: C:/Users/''computer's name''/My Documents/My Games/Final Fantasy XIV- A Realm Reborn

There you will find a file called FFXIV_BOOT
open it using the notepad. in there youll see a bunch of texts that goes roughly or exactly like this:


<FINAL FANTASY XIV Boot Config File>

<Version>
Version 2
Language 1
Region 2
EulaAgreement 1
StartupCompleted 1
B4EulaAgreement 0
BootVersionCheckMode 0
ConfigReset 0

What you wanna do is force your patcher in to dowloading the recent 2.2 patch. in order to do this, youll change the line:

BootVersionCheckMode 0 to BootVersionCheckMode 1

close the file and say yes to save it. now go start your game as usual. this will force your patcher to update itself :)

You probably are running up against the old DX9 mismatch that started with Vista and still comes into play with Win8 from time to time. The usual fix is to run the offline directx 9 redistributable installer and not the latest web installer (usually need older files not provided by the web installer). The offline package is about 95MB and installs all files in the package regardless of what may already be there, so <usually> corrects problems with missing/mismatched DX9 files.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl...s.aspx?id=8109

The page says June 2010, but it was updated in April 2011 (note this is DirectX9, that's why it is so old).

I usually don't trust external d/l of binaries, because they are usually packed with "bonuses" as keyloggers and friends.