I have little hope of finding a solution here...

[Scrote]

...but I am posting this anyways in case someone out there really knows their stuff - or someone from Infogrames happens to read this.

This is not meant to be a slight towards those who post here with suggestions, a lot of you know your **** and that's cool, but this is one of those really irritating windows errors I've seldom seen a solution for, apart from "format and reinstall your OS". And I really want to avoid that.

I speak of the dreaded "invalid page fault in kernel32.dll" problem.

I've never had it before with Civ3 until today, and it keeps happening in the same place. The Persians (bless 'em) declare war on the French and when I hit enter (or click the 0 icon) I get this error:

CIVILIZATION3 caused an invalid page fault in
module KERNEL32.DLL at 0177:bff87eaa.
Registers:
EAX=01242400 CS=0177 EIP=bff87eaa EFLGS=00010206
EBX=00658e38 SS=017f ESP=00400088 EBP=014127c0
ECX=014127c0 DS=017f ESI=014127a0 FS=2f97
EDX=00000000 ES=017f EDI=00656f38 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
55 a1 d8 9c fc bf 8b ec 83 ec 6c 53 56 57 8b 30
Stack dump:
ffecbad7 004000b8 0040009c 0000000e 00000007 c0000005 00000000 00000000
bff87eaa 00000002 00000001 00400190 0001001f 00000000 00000000 00000000

Pretty huh?

Yeah I didn't think so. I have reinstalled my vid drivers, reinstalled Civ3 and the proper patch, tried different combinations of cache and virtual memory settings - including the defaults, ran virus scans, tried it without my firewall running (who knows), done scandisk (both Norton's and the default Win one) and it keeps happening.

I'm running Win98 with all the latest Windows Updates installed, latest detonators for a GF2 Pro, 448 MB of ram, plenty of free HD space, SB live 5.1, PIII 1 Ghz.

I've never had a problem with Civ3 before, ever. The error seems to happen no matter when the message pops up telling me Persia declared war on France, I've instigated it before it happened the first time and it still crashes when I hit enter. Very odd.

So does anyone know why this happens and how to fix it?

Thanks in advance if you do!

S'right,
Scrote

 

[Scrote]

Interesting. It appeared to be something similar to what no.dice was experiencing in another post on this forum. I made the French start war with the Persians and all was fine after that. Must've been some weird glitch with some units stuck somewhere or something like that.

Have little hope of finding out what caused it since it's a pretty big game with lots of units and action going on all over the place.

So there you go!

S'right,
Scrote

 

[J Fred Muggs]

Glad to hear all is working. But for your info check out this thread about DriectX. You don't mention your version.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12143

 

[Jim Faulkner]

I've got the same problem. See my thread about "Consistent, Reproduceable crashing bug in 1.16f" above. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get the English to declare war on the Babylonians, so I can't finish my game.

 

[Scrote]

Mr. Muggs - latest version of DirectX. 8.1a or whatever it is now, I'm always on top of things like that, my system always runs smoothly, I've tweaked and configured it to the max which is why it pisses me off when I get unexplained errors like the one I was getting.

Mr. Faulkner - so it seems that the bug lies somewhere in the declaring-of-war process, seems to be exactly what happened to me. I too have savegames ready to send to anyone who has an interest in making the game work 100% well. Do the tech support/developers still read these boards at all?

S'right,
Scrote

 

[J Fred Muggs]

Originally posted by Scrote
Mr. Muggs - latest version of DirectX. 8.1a or whatever it is now, I'm always on top of things like that, my system always runs smoothly, I've tweaked and configured it to the max which is why it pisses me off when I get unexplained errors like the one I was getting.


S'right,
Scrote

If you follow the links, you'll see that having DX8.1 on your OS maybe the problem. I'm running it on my OS (Win ME) and don't seem to have a problem with Civ, but it seems clear to me that I may with another in the future. It kind of erks me because 8.1 was indicated as ok by MS as a good update for my OS. It is clear to me that this isn't the case. The links talk about the Kernal32 as the big issue and this is the error you are getting. I'd be willing to bet a dollar that more then one person is having a problem running Civ3 because of this.