11-06-2003 18:13									#1
	MS Auto-update broke my RON? Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

My game was running great about a week ago. A saw all the problems that everyone else has been having and felt lucky that my machine seemed to run the game fine.

Then, I updated my computer with auto update from Microsoft...

Now, RON seems to run fine... it loads up fine, the menus work fine, all of the game types start properly, BUT once the actual game starts things go downhill. Everything seems to be running smoothly at the very beginning, usually for about a minute or two, then my graphics just lock up. My lockup is not the hard freeze that has been causing everyone else problems, this lockup only lasts for about 10 seconds, then the game goes back to normal. During the lockup I still have control of the mouse and the music continues to play (I think that is because it has been loaded into memory or something) but all in game and system commands do not work. I can't hit escape, I can't alt-tab, I can't ctrl-alt-delete, nothing. As soon as the freeze stops, everything goes back to normal, and all of the keystrokes that I tried during the freeze are "queued up" and all happen in order as soon as the game un-freezes.

I have tried everything I can think of to fix this problem... driver updates, DirectX updates, bios updates, un-install and re-install of RON, with the game patch, without the game patch... everything.

What was really freaking me out was that it used to work perfectly a week ago. That but my mind in a real boggle because I take very good care of my system and I don't change anything willy-nilly. I immediately began to think it was some sort of hardware problem on my system, but then I spent some time reading the threads on RON Heaven and saw a few people with a similar problem. Someone mentioned that they too started having problems after last week's MS auto update for WinXP.

I went back and checked, and sure enough, RON started having this "mini freeze" problem the day after I updated my computer with auto update. That is the only thing that had changed on my computer that week. Something is fishy with MS auto update.

So, to wrap up, if you have this problem, please post here and let me know if you started seeing the problem after applying last week's auto update from Microsoft. I just got a new auto update yesterday (cumulative IE6 sp 1 patch), but that is not the one I am referring to.