Quote Originally Posted by Cutriss View Post
If that's your idea of an easy fix, I'm glad you never became a surgeon.

I believe the underlying problem stems from SE's console development methodology. One of the reasons Vista required DX10 is because the Aero stuff required use of Direct3D to render screen components, and prior to DX10, D3D only allowed one application to access the framebuffer via D3D at any time. Essentially, the game (or more likely Crystal Tools) has a poorly-constructed rendering engine which is trying to write frame data regardless of the state of the application. For example - a well-designed game shouldn't be trying to draw frames while minimized, as those frames are going to simply be discarded, but yet it does.

The error we're seeing here is not unlike a null pointer exception, actually. The previous device doesn't exist anymore and the engine is continuing to try to write updates to it.

Had Crystal Tools isolated the rendering engine from the game application itself, as would be desireable for having the ability to effect run-time graphics option changes, then I suspect this problem would be much easier for them to fix...but I think ultimately it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how to do proper PC development.
yeah I figured it was a direct X or a Crystal Tools issue, as it was with FFXI (direct X that is), and I normally dont tell people to "oh just do this to bypass your problem" because I know in the PC world....that never really is a good idea. But in this case, it is only the matter of disabling a key on your keyboard temporarily, till the real problem is fixed