Stellaris crashes and hard-locks my PC.

[MrChips]

I am having problems with Stellaris multiplayer randomly crashing and hard-locking my PC so badly that I have to cycle the power button to restart. It happens randomly, sometimes within a matter of minutes, other times after a half an hour or so. Log files show absolutely no record of the crash, or anything happening in the last 8 minutes of my most recent, crash-ended multiplayer session.

I am currently running a completely clean installation (game and launcher of 3.5.2), all files verified twice on Steam. I am running Windows 10 21H2 on a Ryzen 5600X and Radeon 6800XT. This is the only game I've had any issues with on this system; I've been having problems starting in 3.4.5 in multiplayer, where the game would freeze up for a few seconds and desync me from the other players in the session.

Edit: This only seems to happen while playing multiplayer; singleplayer is unaffected.

 

[AndrewT]

Do you or any of your MP players have an ASUS computer? If so they can have an MP 'helper' app (whose name we do not mention in public) that can cause this to MP games. That app would have to be unloaded before starting this game.

If that's not the issue, i don't know what could be causing this to you. This is just you, none of the other players?

Look in the Windows Event Viewer in the few minutes leading up to the event, do you see any significant ERROR or WARNING entries there?