TF2 Vista crash/lockup fix

V

vchip

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Mar 6, 2005
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62
I'm running Vista 64 w/EVGA 8800 GTS with latest drivers. When I start the game
I get the Valve music and a black screen (no dude with spigot in his head) and a little while later I get the loading screen.

Game plays OK for a little while and then hangs, frequentally with looping sound.

I found this on another forum and it's worked for me.

Start the game. When you get to the connect to server screen hit Ctrl+alt+del to bring up task manager. End the task GameOverlayUI.exe. Then close task manager and go back into the game. You won't have any crashing problems. You'll have to do this everytime you start the game.

The thread I found this on said that GameOverlayUI.exe is part of steam and is supposed to terminate when game starts but isn't. In fact, it does not even terminate when you exit the game.
 
deleted... disabling friends options in steam does not fix the problem. Only fix seems to be fix described above.
 
wow i owe you one vchip... worked for me - been playing for over 30 minutes windowed (forced directx 8.1) now without a hitch on xp home with the machine in sig. going to try it fullscreen high settings etc soon. before i would be very lucky to go over five minutes.
 
Wish I had read this lastnight.
I wont be able to try this out till sunday, thanks for the heads up.

 
Thats the shift+tab doohickey isnt it?

People reported issues with that, it works fine for me, specs in sig.
 
I will offer the solution I used... it is not optimal, but it worked for me.

I have Vista 64 bit / 4 gb RAM / 8800 GTS / quad core.

After making a desktop icon from the Steam menu (right click on the game name to get the menu to make a desktop icon) then go to your desktop icon and ---

right click on the icon, click on properties

make this game run in windows XP SP (1 or 2) compatibility mode

then click the box to run this game as an administrator

This is all I did with Windows... on to the game itself.


I know this is not the best solution, but again, it worked for me. I did not do any of that stuff for force direct X 8. I did this instead:

click options from the TF2 options menu. Click on video, and advanced options from the video menu.

I changed the screen size to 800 x 600, and reduced every single option there to the lowest setting. No AA and all of that other stuff.

I was surprised and happy when I was able to play TF2 for 4 hours last night. No hiccups, freezing, lockups, or any issues at all.

Good luck with your TF2.


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I think this is a problem in XP as well, not just Vista.
I am having the same problems in TF2.

I had the problem in HL2 but disabled it, just haven't got to it for TF2 yet.

I wish we had a choice not to install that shit we dont want
:mad:

and if you block it via a firewall, it hangs too...
 
It's so weird seeing so many people with this issue.

I'm running Vista x64 Ultimate on the following:
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe
AMD Opteron 185 2.6GHz
2GB Corsair DDR400 XMS3200 RAM
BFG GeForce 7800GTX OC
Etc.

Never had an issue with TF2.
 
electech98 said:
It's so weird seeing so many people with this issue.

.....

Never had an issue with TF2.
Click to expand...


I wish I had no problems with this game. I wish that my 8800GTS did not have to play this game at 800x600. That sucks ass. Valve should do something about this really quick.

I will check my settings, and tweak to try and get a better video performance... but only after I have played this game a whole bunch. After all, I have been waiting for this game for about 27 years... give or take. :D


 
I found it weird that I couldn't disable the Steam overlay (which I hate). It's disabled in my options but still shows up in TF2.

Thanks for the heads up.
 
just an update for anyone else having their machine hardlock, bsod, etc under xp... this works for me in the sense i can play for hours without any of the above bs happening. the shitty part is i am playing windowed, forced directx 8.1, and relatively medium setting (no aa/af, hdr etc etc). at least i can get my fix until someone comes up with a real fix.

after the patch i can play 1680x1050, forced dx8.1 with all settings maxed. tried reverting back to dx9 but machine started to lock up again.
 
This batch file should launch TF2 and kill off GameOverlayUI.exe so you don't need to do it manually each time you start the game ... just use this batch file instead of Steam's shortcut:

Code: 
@ECHO OFF
C:
cd C:\Games\Steam
C:\Games\Steam\Steam.exe -applaunch 440
sleep 60
taskkill /F /T /IM GameOverlayUI.exe
Note: Replace C: and C:\Games\Steam with the path to your Steam executable.

Also, I'm not sure if 440 is the ID _always_ used by steam for TF2, so you will probably want to have Steam create a shortcut for you and make sure it's running Steam.exe -applaunch 440 (or replace it if different).

If you don't have sleep.exe on your system (this is necessary because GameOverlayUI.exe isn't started immediately, you've got to wait for TF2 to start before Steam spawns that process) you can get it as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Toolkit (it's somewhere around a 10MB download, you can grab it from Microsoft's site).

Oh yeah, and you might need to run this as Administrator in Vista -- I'm not sure if Vista will complain about you trying to kill GameOverlayUI.exe or not.

EDIT: Just tested it, works great, doesn't need to be run as Administrator. You could probably tweak the 60 second sleep down to maybe 45 or 30 seconds, but it does the job at 60 and gives your computer a bit of leeway on how fast it's gotta load up TF2 so it's all good. =)
 
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