Difficulty running Source engine under Vista

N

nerr

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 19, 2008
Messages
216
I think I've got an issue with the Source engine in Vista. I play Team Fortress 2 on a regular basis, and on both Vista PCs that I use, I've had difficulty using it. One was 32-bit, the other is 64-bit. Randomly while playing, TF2 will lock up, and an error will show up that says "hl2.exe has stopped working", or I'll get an error that says "Microsoft Visual C++ Library Runtime Error: the program has terminated in an abnormal way", which will then be followed up by the "hl2.exe has stopped working" message. This is really getting on my nerves, because I just built this new gaming PC, and I'm already having issues running one of my favorite games with it. Does anybody have any clue on how I should go about fixing this issue? What could be causing the program to "terminate in an abnormal way"? Thanks for any help.
 
I've had it happen too. It's not reproducible nor consistent, but it only happens once in a while, so I suck it up and blame it on poor coding. For the longest time, when I launched the game and it said "Team Fortress 2 is now loading...", if I clicked somewhere else or browsed Firefox while the game was launching (could take around 10 seconds), the game would crash after launching, which I thought was terribly poor quality control, so, I don't really expect much better in the rest of the game.
 
Cyrilix said:
I've had it happen too. It's not reproducible nor consistent, but it only happens once in a while, so I suck it up and blame it on poor coding. For the longest time, when I launched the game and it said "Team Fortress 2 is now loading...", if I clicked somewhere else or browsed Firefox while the game was launching (could take around 10 seconds), the game would crash after launching, which I thought was terribly poor quality control, so, I don't really expect much better in the rest of the game.
Click to expand...

lol. Source is one of the best programmed engines of all time.

I wouldn't mind an answer to this. I'll see what steam has to say in a sec I gtg for now.
 
Try updating your video drivers (or maybe older ones if you have the newest), certain Nvidia drivers caused crashing constantly in TF2 (but not CS:S) for me. I find the 163.75 work best for me, the latest versions actually lock up my system every few hours.
 
Heres how I got HL2.exe to stop crashing

Start>Control Panel>System>Advanced System Settings> Click continue at prompt, click Advanced tab, on performance click Settings, click on Data Execution Prevention Choose turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select then add HL2.exe

I havent had a HL2 crash since
 
ooohhhh its DEP's fault. Yeah ok.

DEP is Vistas implementation of No execute bit and whatever right? AMD and Intel both have hardware implementations of this technology. One calls it no execute bit, the other calls it something else. Its anti-virus at a hardware level. This is Windows' implementation?
 
If you have "only turn on DEP for essential Windows programs and services" enabled, then DEP isn't enabled for HL2, so going to "Enable DEP for all programs and services" and then excluding HL2 isn't going to make any difference, really. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't make sense.
 
DEP is implemented at the hardware level, but it has to be turned on in the OS to do anything. As devil22 pointed out, by default in Vista it is turned on for essential windows programs only. Turning it on for all but selected is the more secure setting, but does require you to whitelist applications known to have DEP problems.

As mentioned, this is likely a video driver problem. I've had the same startup issues on my 8800GT system, but not my ATI systems.
 
I'm using the latest video drivers I could find for my HD 4870. Catalyst 8.6, if that matters. Perhaps my card is just a little bit too new to have all of the bugs worked out of it yet. Guess I'll keep waiting for new drivers in the mean time.
 
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