I've experienced this as well. I played several "test" games, just getting an idea for how the changes worked, and never progressed past the Middle Ages era. Then in my first "real" game, I was playing right along, and suddenly while I'm waiting after I finished a turn a message came up saying "Civilization3.e.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log is being created." Now this happened shortly after moving into the Middle Ages era, so I've gotten past this point in the games before. I loaded up the autosave of the turn this occured after, and the same thing happened.
I did a "search for files or folders" in Windows, and looked for "error log" (without quotes around it). This brought up 178 files, so I listed them by date to see what had been last modified the most recently. Sure enough, there were only a few that had been modified the day this happened, two of which at the exact right time. One was titled "logfile" and was in the Civilization 3 directory, but it was just an empty text document, with no writing appearing in Wordpad and taking up 0 KB of space. The other was titled "drwtsn32" and was located in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\DrWatson. Each time that I reloaded the autosave of that turn after making some changes (shutting down other programs, restarting my computer, etc.) this error occured, and the empty "logfile" would have its modified time as the time of the latest error occurance, but the "drwtsn32" modified time remained the same as the original occurance.
Now I sent all this information off to Infogrames from their tech-support page, including the contents of the "drwtsn32" file. I waited a long time for their response, and in the meantime started a new game of Civ3. This of course overwrote the autosaves of my previous game, so when I went back to test something with it (still no response from Infogrames at this point), I had to load it up several turns before the point where the error had occured. I went through the turns pretty quickly, remembering for the most part what my decisions had been before, but this time the error occured one turn earlier! After 270AD as opposed to after 280AD. I don't know if this means anything, but its kinda weird.
Finally after almost 2 weeks Infogrames sends me an email, and it suggests that I update my video driver
. I stated in my first email that everything was up-to-date, but just to humor them I went online and downloaded the latest video driver for my system from Dell.com, which was listed new as of one month prior to me getting this machine. I installed the new driver, tried out the game (from several turns before the point where the original error occured because my autosaves had been overwritten) and the same error came up after 270AD (the new error point). I sent them another email, explaining everything I've said here, including the error point moving, and am still waiting for a response.
If anybody wants me to post the "drwtsn32" contents, I will, but they are rather long and mostly computer gibberish that only programers would understand.
along for a while, maybe an hour or so and BAM I get a message and my Windows2000 kicks me out of the game. Message reads "Civilization3.e.exe has generated an error and will be closed by Windows". First of all what kind of exe file is this? It has an extra period and "e" between the delimiter period and the exe extension. Has anybody else had this problem? I know the Civ executes a file called Civilization3.exe to run the game.
