Calling all WoW-techies

BigSlick · 05-10-2008, 01:00 PM

So while I hope none of you have had the issue that seems to be plaguing me of late, if any of you have and found a solution I'd love to hear it.

Basically, I'll be playing WoW as normal on Bigslick, no new mods or anything, and all of a sudden I get a fatal exception error forcing the app to close. On restarting and logging in, after anywhere from 0 to 10 seconds, the error repeats and closes it down again. I can log into any of my alts with no problem - this just impacts Bigslick (all mods are deployed the same across all my toons). Disabling all mods doesn't help.

The only solution I've found is to use the Repair utility, which comments on how my install is 'seriously damaged' and needs to be reverted to a previous version. Time to d/l everything from 2.0 forward, oh joy! A couple of GB and a few hours later I'm up and running. This has happened 3 times in the past, and now has happened yesterday and again just now. I'm just about fed up with it, and Blizzard has never even given me a 'generic' response when I've filled in the form that's auto-generated on crash, or to direct inquiry on their site. The only saving grace is that it hasn't happened in the middle of a raid.

Has anyone had this issue before? Any suggestions?

Edit: On the bright side, it looks like since I just d/l'd everything yesterday some of it is still cached, so it won't be as bad this time.

ScratchMonkey · 05-10-2008, 01:17 PM

Start by marking everything in the data directory read-only, and perhaps all the executables and dlls.

I sometimes get this because my system is too hot and the data file is getting corrupted in memory.

Centurien · 05-12-2008, 08:21 PM

Yeah, I had some bad RAM so it took awhile for my comp to need to use it (2GB on XP) but when it needed it it always caused a game crash. It seemed to occur almost exclusively on my main.

**Jest** · 05-13-2008, 02:29 PM

When I've had data corruption issues it usually points to a hardware problem, which could be from any of your core components: ram, motherboard, hard drive or processor. So replacing one of those is what is usually going to solve it.

You may also want to get into your motherboard startup settings and adjust some of the speed settings on your ram and or processor to a lower multiplier...or on some mobos you can just select the "safe" profile. Sometimes that can help as well.

BigSlick · 05-13-2008, 02:37 PM

Thanks for the insights. I did upgrade the RAM about 2 months ago from 2GB to 4GB (mostly just to boost performance) and, if I recall correctly, the issue first occurred sometime after that point. I've also had a few "System Crash Memory Dumps" occur (I guess it's the updated Vista version of the blue-screen-of-death) so maybe I'll reach out to Dell and see just how much they stand up to their reputation.