I'll Pay $20 to whoever solves this...

[dennylynch]

Just bought a brand new latop solely to play Civ IV. I dowloaded the patch, but still get repeated "Civ IV has encountered a problem and needs to close" messages almost every time I try to load it. Oddly, twice it has loaded and run fine, but other times I get this error.

The system is a Gateway 3725, 1 Gig Ram, Radeon 600 graphics.

If you're the first to tell me the trick to get the program to always load, I'll
send $20 to you through PayPal or US mail.

 

[abeverat]

Do you get any more info (generally you have to hit a button to make it appear) on what is causing the problem ? Like, kernel32 has caused a system fealure or anything like that ?

 

[dennylynch]

I'm judt click on the "Launch Sid Meier's Civ IV" icon on the desktop. The "loading" screen appears (for maybe 30 seconds) then it dumps to the Windows message quoted above.

 

[Markus5]

Get the latest updates from Microsoft.
Get the latest drivers from ATI.
There were suggestions that certain CD/DVD drives didn't like CivIV's copy-protection scheme. There might be a thread on it...
Turn off virus scanning software.
Increase your swap file size. (A lot.)

When I have this problem, its almost always after CivIV has crashed while in a game. My guess is that there is some system resource that is not being freed when it crashes. Probably video driver related (another guess). I reboot and all is well. If I don't reboot, CivIV will continue to fail as you describe. I have lots of progam debugging tools and knowledge, but have not been motivated (that is, angry enough) to dig into the problem.

Good luck.

If any of this is any help, keep the $20 and pretend you bought me a beer.

 

[civ_god06]

Try disabling any backgroung apps through the msconfig program
-start
-run
-type msconfig and enter
-click on the startup tab
-click disable all then apply and close and restart the comp

try the game again.