Vista - Crash on almoust every game

First of all, Hi This is my first thread on the forums.
I bet you heard it alot, but yes it actually crashes to the desktop on almoust every game that i play. FS X, Settlers 6, Half Life 2, Bioshock, and the list goes on.. The crashes are that the game just freezes abit and it switches to the desktop and says that the app has crashed, and gives me a choise between check the net for the solution and restart it. Sometimes the errors explain the app crash with a direct x file as the "couse" of the problem. While i checked the forums i saw a few video drivers and tryed to install them. Each driver gave me diffrent "new" problems. some of them crashed the game but it took it about 10-15 more mins to do it.
The latest NVIDIA driver is the moust unstable from all the drivers that i have tryed....
Some of the drivers even crashed into the BSOD with a 101 error...
And when it showed it, the error was about some other file, somehow related to
Sometimes it crashes to the desktop with a file from the game it self as the couse of the crash, for example client.dll for Half Life EP 2.


My specs are :
AMD Athlon 2x3000+
GeForce 8800GT 512MB only 1 card
4Gb RAM
Vista Ultimate x64
Is there anything that i'm missing here? Or is it just the Vista? And if it is... should i just install XP and wait untill Vista will have a good support of drivers and fixes.

Vista has great driver support. Unfortunately, there's a problem with your install; hopefully, we'll be able to sort it out?

First, are you overclocking? Do you have Service Pack 1 installed? Have you applied the latest DirectX patch? Latest DirectX Update

i'm not overclocking or underclocking. yes i have SP1 installe and the latest Directx.. i have seen some of the stability fixes, and i have tryed to install them, but it said that it won't install it for my system or something like that. so i guess i have installed it somewhere thru windows update.

Have you got the disk that came with your graphics card?
If you have uninstall the nvidea software in safe mode.
Go into device driver and uninstall the graphics device compleatly.
Restart your computer.
You will now get a dialog saying that vista has found new hardware.
Insert your graphics card dvd and install the software.

Has this helped?

Right-click icon > compatibility > choose XP SP2
I did that for Neverwinter Nights, nothing worked until then.

Hi everyone

I'm new to this forum too. Just set up a new rig a week ago and decided to run Vista Home Premium 64 bit but am encountering similar problems as Googler so I hope I'm not jacking this thread by sharing my problems on this thread.

System specs are:

Striker II Formula (Bios 1602)
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
4 Gb RAM (2x2)
GeForce GTX 280 (single card with pilot version 7.15.11.7813 - nVidia ForceWare 178.13)
OCZ EliteXtreme 800W PSU

All drivers are up to date, including latest Dx updates. I've also run Memtest86+ v 2.01 (single/dual module setup with slot switching) and Prime95 for 8-10 hours without errors.

There is no overclocking involved and system boots to Windows without a problem. However, whenever I try to game, I either get BSOD while logging in or after 20-30 mins.

Temperatures are at:

Motherboard 40-45°
Core 40-50°
GPU 47° (idle) - 60° (load)

System does not always provide an error report, but I'll do a copy and paste the next time it happens.


Any help will be appreciated and my apologies to Googler for posting my problems here, but hopefully there'll be a single solution to both our problems as the system only crashes during gaming.

Thanks Bert I'll give this a try with Guild Wars but the problem seems to persist with CoH: Opposing Fronts and Assassin's Creed as well.

hmmm, well roy69 i will try that in a few days, won't be able to get to the comp for a few days. and Bert_H, i have tryed that on every game i have and it won't help :S .
Np, MFerret, nothing bad has happened..

i was having a similar issue with my system and like you have already noticed the graphics drivers are unstable and can be the main cause for this as it was for me ATI only just managed to get it right in 8.9 but you might want to check other drivers and try them to see if you are still having instability in your games another one to check is that your card is not overheating as this can cause similar problems.

hope i helped and that you get this solved soon good luck!

ok i kinda solved my issues.. (i hope, i have a full day of tests tommorow but now it looks kinda nice, played for 4 hours now without crashing).
the thing is that my card is made by Leadtek. now i checked their site and got myself a driver, 177.79 WinFast PX8800 GT(NVIDIA). and when i run the game under WinXP Compatability it works fine . i hope it will run fine for me tommorow, and i hope i helped some of you guys
*edit*
1 more thing is that i set the affinity to 1 of the cores, i heard that some of the games have problems with dual cores.. so this is some sort of a solution to it.

Glad you have gotton somewhere with the problem.