I was happily shooting at some guys tonight when the game just froze on me and some other people. I heard guys say they had to hard reboot to come back. I tried to explain over TS that you can get back to desktop without rebooting, but my english is not so good and I was not understood. What I'll explain here works for me all the time.

When BF freezes, windows is still running in the background but for some weird reason the video card is stuck on BF even when you alt-tab. This means that you can still use windows keyboard shortcuts to do whatever you want, but you won't see a thing while you're doing it. Here's what to do (see attached image to better understand):

1. CTRL-ALT-DEL - This brings up the "Windows Task Manager". The task manager has five tabs. Everytime you execute the task manager it will open on the same tab it was when you last closed it. For the trick to work it has to be either on the "Applications" tab or the "Processes" tab.

2. Hit the "B" key. This should highlight BF2142.exe in the process list.

3. Hit the "Delete" key. If you're in the "Applications" tab, it should instantly kill the BF2142 process and bring you right back to desktop, skip to step 5. If you're in the "Processes" tab, you should hear the standard windows beep sound. Windows is now asking you to confirm that you want to terminate the process. (See the "Task Manager Warning" window in the attached picture.)

4. Hit the "Enter" key. By default, the "Yes" option is highlighted. By hitting "Enter" you are confirming that you want to terminate the process. You should now be back to the desktop.

5. Restart the game and get back to business!

Note: This might not work if you are running other programs or processes that start with the letter B. Say you were running a program called "BATTLECHESS.exe", you might have stopped it instead of BF2142. You can repeat step 1 to 5 until BF2142 terminates.

I hope this can be helpful for some of you.