Castellon said:
You may be right, but the High Command Group uses Team Speak and MSN Messenger, so I am stuck there.
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You may be right, but the High Command Group uses Team Speak and MSN Messenger, so I am stuck there.
Two small remarks.
1) You could check out Jabber as a MSN messenger replacement. It's capable of interfacing with, amongst others, MSN Messenger. However, your ISP must have a Jabber server setup to handle the cross-messenger communications.
2) You cannot get rid of Internet Explorer. The only thing you can do, is to get rid of IEXPLORE.EXE, which is the user interface front end for it. The actual IE engine (HTML rendering, etc) is buried deep inside the Windows Kernel and cannot be removed. And that is because the desktop, Windows Explorer, configuration panel and what not all use it.
1) You could check out Jabber as a MSN messenger replacement. It's capable of interfacing with, amongst others, MSN Messenger. However, your ISP must have a Jabber server setup to handle the cross-messenger communications.
2) You cannot get rid of Internet Explorer. The only thing you can do, is to get rid of IEXPLORE.EXE, which is the user interface front end for it. The actual IE engine (HTML rendering, etc) is buried deep inside the Windows Kernel and cannot be removed. And that is because the desktop, Windows Explorer, configuration panel and what not all use it.
jpd said:Two small remarks.
1) You could check out Jabber as a MSN messenger replacement. It's capable of interfacing with, amongst others, MSN Messenger. However, your ISP must have a Jabber server setup to handle the cross-messenger communications.
2) You cannot get rid of Internet Explorer. The only thing you can do, is to get rid of IEXPLORE.EXE, which is the user interface front end for it. The actual IE engine (HTML rendering, etc) is buried deep inside the Windows Kernel and cannot be removed. And that is because the desktop, Windows Explorer, configuration panel and what not all use it.
Interesting point you make about explorer. I see the reasoning though.
I guess really I was looking for some backup to the + side of Mozilla I have been reading. I think I will stick with explorer for now after sleeping on it.
After all going to Mozilla will complicate my install. I might experiment with it later after I get bored. Never heard of Jabber, but will look into it, but for now I will also get MSN Messenger.
Castellon said:
What is FP, I see you saying that alot.
I have decided on Windows Defender (Beta-2) and F-Secure Anti Virus for my pop-up, anti-spyware, and anti-virus protection.
I also have two firewalls operating. Windows Firewall and the integrated firewall that is part of my FiOS ISP network.
F-Secure has a free 6 month subscription and includes anti-spyware protection as well. So I have two services monitering spyware and pop-ups.
Works for me.
So far they are all running well together.
There is one other thing I did different in this install than I did in the other attempts.
When I restored my system and went to update XP at the M$ update scan it would prompt me to install a host of security updates that were part of SP-1 and not give me the option to install SP-2 until I installed all of them.
This time arround I turned off auto-update and went right for the SP-2 install ignoring all the SP-1 Hotfix and Security Updates.
After installing SP-2 the M$ auto update scan prompts me to install a host of updates for that.
I chose to install only 5 of those and left all the others out for now.
It occured to me that my HOI-2 seemed to generate the problems in a more chronic state after I had allowed all the SP-1 updates and then adding SP-2 and all the SP-2 updates.
With my current install if I have to troubleshoot HOI-2 without all the SP updates I can now uninstall what amounts to only 6 updates including SP-2 to return to factory install status.
If I added the multitude of SP updates it would have wanted me to it would be far too agravating to go through the Add/Remove program process to uninstall them individually. Having to reboot after practicly every single one.
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Tris said:
Read the sticky threads
Especially the one when you read the title it will become clear that you should have already read it.
3 hours on auto afk play and no errors, or crashes. I am not giving the all clear as yet though.
YAY, so far is the best I can do.
I have come to a tentative conclusion based on all my experience regarding my particular crash problems.
Considering the amount of time and contemplation I have put into it and all my installs and reconfigurations as well as my observations of "what happened when" I am at the moment leaning towards the explanation for my problem as being rooted in the install procedure and/or choice of the Windows Service Packs, Patches, and Hot fixes. That is at this point my best guess.
Perhaps allowing my install to indiscriminantly update the totality of SP-1 with all of its updates, patches and hotfixes as prescribed by M$'s auto update scan prior to installing SP-2 (which I later found out was unnessessary), or perhaps allowing an indiscriminate total update of the SP-2 patches, and hotfixes using the M$ update scan.
This even though I only ran the critical scan as opposed to the comprehensive one.
One other piece of advice I adhered to in this current SP-2 Install (with only 5 very discriminate updates) was not utilizing the online install offered by M$;
rather I D/L'd the SP's to a folder and installed from there.
Unfortunately even if I have successfully narrowed down the problem to what it has to do with I doubt I will ever know the specific point at which I might have caused the problem to appear. All I can relate is the procedure I followed to finaly achieve success which has been described in parts in earlier posts as well as this one. Even then it is possible that with all the changes and improvements I have made; it might not be the SP issue at all, but some other obscure issue I managed to eradicate without actually identifying.
As an example one problem I and many others with my video card have experienced are two error messages related to Nvidea WDM video capture and Nvidea Crossbar drivers attempting to install when the card has neither of those capabilities. It took me days to diffinitively determine these were probably benign problem/issues and I finaly managed to track down the culprit registry entries to get rid of them. There were other equally agravating nuissance issues I tracked down and eradicated during this troubleshooting process. In the end I found the whole project a good learning experience and it has advanced my comprehension of software integration and internet security greatly. As a bonus my computer is pretty well souped up.
It should be noted that in fact my game operated flawlessly for nearly a week in MP sessions that went on for 10 hours and more at a time with just SP-1 installed.
It was only after I had felt compfortable running the program error free for that length of time that I decided to upgrade to SP-2 and it was after that that my game steadily began to deteriorate with various symtoms of failure at completely random times that could never be duplicated at will.
Sometimes it would operate for hours at a time without incident and at other times it would crash multiple times in a row right off the bat. I had previously done several system reinstalls in my attempt to correct these problems and always would end up with the same problems except for that period I described above wherein I held off going to SP-2.
The majority of crashes by far were the ones I listed in the first two messages of this thread, but there were a few instances where the game would just close and disapear without an on screen error window. In addition during the degradation period even when not operating the game I would on occasion get an Explorer.Exe Error out of nowhere.
I have been Tab/Alt ing to minimize the game all night now to surf and post and still no problems.
Interestingly; I have discovered that Tab/Alt to minimize the game puts it in pause.
Never knew that.
Been 5 Hours now and still no problems. "Way to Go"
YAY, so far is the best I can do.
I have come to a tentative conclusion based on all my experience regarding my particular crash problems.
Considering the amount of time and contemplation I have put into it and all my installs and reconfigurations as well as my observations of "what happened when" I am at the moment leaning towards the explanation for my problem as being rooted in the install procedure and/or choice of the Windows Service Packs, Patches, and Hot fixes. That is at this point my best guess.
Perhaps allowing my install to indiscriminantly update the totality of SP-1 with all of its updates, patches and hotfixes as prescribed by M$'s auto update scan prior to installing SP-2 (which I later found out was unnessessary), or perhaps allowing an indiscriminate total update of the SP-2 patches, and hotfixes using the M$ update scan.
This even though I only ran the critical scan as opposed to the comprehensive one.
One other piece of advice I adhered to in this current SP-2 Install (with only 5 very discriminate updates) was not utilizing the online install offered by M$;
rather I D/L'd the SP's to a folder and installed from there.
Unfortunately even if I have successfully narrowed down the problem to what it has to do with I doubt I will ever know the specific point at which I might have caused the problem to appear. All I can relate is the procedure I followed to finaly achieve success which has been described in parts in earlier posts as well as this one. Even then it is possible that with all the changes and improvements I have made; it might not be the SP issue at all, but some other obscure issue I managed to eradicate without actually identifying.
As an example one problem I and many others with my video card have experienced are two error messages related to Nvidea WDM video capture and Nvidea Crossbar drivers attempting to install when the card has neither of those capabilities. It took me days to diffinitively determine these were probably benign problem/issues and I finaly managed to track down the culprit registry entries to get rid of them. There were other equally agravating nuissance issues I tracked down and eradicated during this troubleshooting process. In the end I found the whole project a good learning experience and it has advanced my comprehension of software integration and internet security greatly. As a bonus my computer is pretty well souped up.
It should be noted that in fact my game operated flawlessly for nearly a week in MP sessions that went on for 10 hours and more at a time with just SP-1 installed.
It was only after I had felt compfortable running the program error free for that length of time that I decided to upgrade to SP-2 and it was after that that my game steadily began to deteriorate with various symtoms of failure at completely random times that could never be duplicated at will.
Sometimes it would operate for hours at a time without incident and at other times it would crash multiple times in a row right off the bat. I had previously done several system reinstalls in my attempt to correct these problems and always would end up with the same problems except for that period I described above wherein I held off going to SP-2.
The majority of crashes by far were the ones I listed in the first two messages of this thread, but there were a few instances where the game would just close and disapear without an on screen error window. In addition during the degradation period even when not operating the game I would on occasion get an Explorer.Exe Error out of nowhere.
I have been Tab/Alt ing to minimize the game all night now to surf and post and still no problems.
Interestingly; I have discovered that Tab/Alt to minimize the game puts it in pause.
Never knew that.
Been 5 Hours now and still no problems. "Way to Go"
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Total 6 hours game test while afk checking back and forth to close windows went on for about 2 years game time.
No Crashes.
Then started an MP game 3 hours into it with 10 people. No crashes.
Problem solved so far.
EDIT 8 hours later......
8 hour MP session went off without a hitch. No crashes at all.
I'm happy; thread now closed
No Crashes.
Then started an MP game 3 hours into it with 10 people. No crashes.
Problem solved so far.
EDIT 8 hours later......
8 hour MP session went off without a hitch. No crashes at all.
I'm happy; thread now closed
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