Odysseus 's Profile

Ram can fail at any time and many times it's hard to
detect because a certain memory area that is failing to hold a charge may work
much of the time and then after a while start acting up and causing errors.
There are memory test utilities that boot from a floppy that will detect errors
one of them is "MEMTEST 86". Search google and download this free tool if you
want to check your ram. Beware that many times the memtest will report an error
that may not have any bearing on the ram being good or bad so read any
documentation carefully. That being said, I think with bad ram you would
experience problems with almost any program not just certain games but memory
timings are something to look at when the system is unstable.

You may
already know the following but just in case I just went ahead and explained
things in detail.

You have described a certain error message in windows
so I think it is a device driver / OS related problem. Could be the video driver
or how the system is handling virtual memory. Make sure you have no spyware or
viruses, make sure you have the latest video driver for you video card,
temporarily turn off
"System Restore" on all drives in the system properties
(turn this back on later). Temporarily disable all devices in the device manager
that aren't necessary to play the game such as usb devices, scanner/printers,
network by clicking properties then disable ( Turn these back on later). Then go
to "start", "run" and type msconfig then go to the startup tab. Uncheck all
items in the startup, click apply, ok and reboot. Try the game again if problem
solved re-enable all of them one at a time until error appears again to find the
offending device or program. If the errors are still present after disabling
these items, boot the computer from the XP disc (I presume it's XP) and when it
gets to the menu choose repair recovery console, log in with your password, if
no password just hit enter. Now type chkdsk /r this will check the disk for
errors and repair any discrepancies without any hinderances from the system
because you are booted to the cd. When it is finished it will give a summary so
you will see if it repaired anything. Type exit and reboot to windows and try
the game again, if still errors, reboot to the cd but this time at the menu
choose to install windows XP. It will then go to a menu that says it detected a
previous install and would you like to repair that install. Choose to repair the
previously installed XP. If you choose new install your programs will no longer
work unless you reinstall them so make sure you choose to repair the existing
install. The repair process will not damage any existing data other than
reinstalling the windows system files and repairing any system registry enteries
that have been corrupted. After this try the game again, hopefully no errors.
Regarless of errors or not, go back and start re-enabling all of the disabled
items. They are: "System Restore", "All Devices" (hardware tab, device manger)
in the system properties and "All Startup programs" (start, run, msconfig,
startup). After all is done run the windows update to update the OS from MS
website.

Sounds like alot to do but finding and eliminating these error
are sometimes very hard to pinpoint.

This is my latest update on my journey to finding
this solution. There is a link at the bottom-I think you will find this article
from Smart Computing found to be the most helpful. Please read my following
correspondence with my friends whom have been helping me. Excuse the bad
language and temper as I’m sure you can relate to how frustrating this error has
been. I hope this helps.



I'm still friggin fighting this stupid
error! OK, so hopefully this is it...I know for SURE that it is a driver issue.
Think about it...first thing I tried was updating the driver and it stopped
rebooting all the way out...but the monitor was still clicking to black screen
ALL the time.

(tried various other things)
But, the next thing I
tried which had to do with the drivers was...I uninstalled the current nVidia
driver and reinstalled using my eVGA disk which came with the graphic card.
Older version driver but I was willing to do anything. OK, so I had good luck
here. It was about 3 days before another crash happened and it doesn't do it
near as often. So...........

So, today I did this lady's advice first
found here:
http://www.barrett.net/xpmemorydump.html

I researched
some more and finally found a program on Guru 3D.COM called Nasty File Remover 0.71. The idea here is to use
this program to find left over driver files that could be conflicting. So I did
a search for all NVidia driver files and it said there were like 70 files... so
I deleted all of them, every one of them. Then I went into the Control Panel and
uninstalled anything that had to do with nVidia. Then I once again reinstalled
the same eVGA graphic card driver disc that came with my GeForce FX 5200 graphic
card and here I am now.

I am totally convinced that NO ONE knows for
absolute certainty what this problem is. So many people are having this it's
ridiculous. I have people emailing me asking me for help now because they saw my
posts on other sites and believe it or not, when I Google for "Sysdata.xml" now,
the threads here on DGNF come up towards the very top. I read technical reports
from Microsoft and some went to McAfee, others went to MoBo Vendors, others to
graphic card vendors, and there are numerous please for help on Computer tech
forums...it's friggin everywhere! What surprises me is that I have 2 separate
reports from Microsoft technical support sessions on this same issue. One
reporting it to be a driver corrupting a PTE table
http://67.15.19.177/showthread.php?t=39722

One
reporting it to this one poor guy as everything under the sun from hardware
drivers to bad proc, bad mobo, and bad ram...they dont ****in know
http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=39574

Well
holy crapola! Lookee what I found! A friggin article on this thing by Smart
Computing. FINALLY, maybe now I can get somewhere...
HA! I knew it was a
stupid driver issue!

http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/2004/s1509/38s09/38s09.asp&articleid=21091


Please let this be the end...DIE sucka error
DIE!