Civ reboots Windows

[Illdisposed]

Hello.
I am having a problem with Civ 4 and I almost broke my head in empty attemts to solve it.This was not around until I reinstalled Windows recently.
It is an old issue of the game reading XML files on start up and freezing, crashing or , in my case, rebooting Windows.I went through stickie threads about that issue and figured that it has, in fact, nothing to do with XML and rather with my sound card driver. I'm using Realtek High Definition Audio and my system works perfectly fine, I am able to play music, record it etc, but when it comes to starting Civ, it crashes and reboots OS. When I was cheking my Sound and Voice controls I found out that it was some sort of a microfone problem; when I tested Sound Hardware the same reboot occured and on the next start up I got a message saying "Your sound hardware cannot simultaneously play sounds and capture your voice".I tried muting microfone, changing inputs/outputs but nothing helped.I went to Realtek website and dowloaded updates but it didnt do anything either( I knew it wouldnt because the game ran perfectly with the same drivers before).At last, I uninstalled driver and the game launched, but without a sound.
So, my question is: Is there any way to skip this XML load during the game start-up, or configure my playback/record settings to fix the issue?
I really dont care about the microfone issue, I am not going to voice chat with anyone...And why does such thing crashes the game and restarts the system?
Please help! Any feedback is appreciated.Thanks!

P.S.Im using Windows XP,all system reqs are passed and I have only one soundcard.

 

[auldian]

Is there any way to skip this XML load during the game start-up

You can hold the left shift key (right may work too) during the initial "Loading ... " screen until you see "Init XML (uncached)" or a note to that effect. This I think flushes the old \cache and hence any obsolete settings. In the civilizationiv.ini file you can also toggle:

; Disable caching of file system (may slow initialization)
DisableFileCaching = 0

; Disable caching of xml and file system (may slow initialization)
DisableCaching = 0

I really dont care about the microfone issue, I am not going to voice chat with anyone

You can disable microphone I expect through your control panel. There are settings in the civilizationiv.ini file you might experiment with as well:

; Enable/disable background music
PlayMusic = 1

; Enable voice over IP capture and playback (Default = 1)
EnableVoice = 0

A couple of things in the Fix-It List that may be beneficial are the MSXML update (you likely already tried) and the more recent DirectX 9.0c release. Be sure your DirectX 9.0c is from August 20005 or newer.
If you still have problems, check a dxdiag.txt for conflicts and look at the logs in "eventvwr.msc" for errors at the point of reboots. Post snippets to this thread (or the txt files) if you want more eyes to look it over for conflicts.
Good luck. Let us know how it goes.

 

[Illdisposed]

I cannot find proper words to describe my gratitude,respect and appreciation to you, very kind sir.You made it work!!!
First off, shift thingy didnt workII've tries that before)I did some messing around those commands in civilizationiv.ini file, launched the game without any hope whatsoever and it successfully bypassed XML checks.I have sound now!!!
Thank you kindly Auldian.You obviously know your stuff.

 

[auldian]

Glad to hear you're in business. Thanks for posting back