Originally Posted by Avs

Hey Assault, can you describe more issues in depth (unless you already did so earlier in the thread that you can point out).

Ive seen problems such as:

Repeated de-sync of the server (lockups of 10+ seconds, then several seconds of no lag before seeing the "Reconnecting" popup).

Display issues (partly having to do with some sort of memory error or leak? that occurs in steam with the overlay that pretty much requires a restart because the error resides in the video card memory).

Loading with a slanted/angled screen: Where once you load in your screen is angled and you have to rejoin to fix usually.

Basically it comes down to this. On the 6th I downloaded the demo since all who pre-ordered had early access to it. That night I had one or two lockups with the sound looping problem where the game is frozen but Windows isn't and you can close the game down in Task Manager and then get back in game without a system restart. Valve issued the first patch that evening I think it was and then a second the next day or the day after. From the 6th until the 10th everything was okay except for the occassional lockup like I mentioned above or the minor server join bugs.

It might have been late on the 10th or early the 11th when Valve issued the third patch and that's when the hard lockups started. Over the course of playing for about two and half hours that night I had five hard locks requiring a full system restart. Four were in-game and the fifth just sitting in a lobby waiting for the game to start. Every server I played on that night had choke ranging from 10 - 60 constantly while my ping was in the 80's or 90's.

On the 12th I started reading through the Steam forums and the 411 forums and found a large number of posts with people who had either the looping sound crash or the lockup issue. Some suggest that L4D isn't handling multi cores very well which could be my problem as I'm running a Quad Core 2.

After going through all the user fixes I went back into the game and turned off the sync with Steam Cloud, made sure V-sync was disabled, changed the page memory from high to medium and then opened the console to type in the mat_queue_mode 0 command to change from multi core to single core as several people said doing that solved their crashes and lockups. Low and behold the system locked up completely not more than 10 seconds after that while sitting at the menu screen

Later that day I updated my DirectX files, and made sure all my drivers were up to date which they were before the 11th with the exception of the video card which I did that later night thinking the out of date driver was the source of the lockups which it wasn't. I then did the local content delete and re-downloaded the demo and made sure all the settings changes I did before were set without doing the mat_queue command. So far I haven't played the demo again to test it all out.

Everything else I've run over the past month be it Stranglehold, Oblivion, COH, CS: Source and Quantum of Solace runs flawlessly (well, except Oblivion but anybody who knows that game knows all too well about its instability problems ). On the plus side, one of the Valve reps did show up in the major crash thread on the Steam forums to request information from all those who were experiencing crashes/lockups so they seem to be aware of the situation. Here's hoping they can get it sorted by the 18th.