jostapo

In the System Properties dialog you will find a trouble shooting tab. On it is a "Disable Synchronous Buffer Commits". Ensure that this is _NOT_ checked. Also, verify that "Disable write-behind caching for all drives" _IS_ checked. The latter setting may impact your system's performance while saving data (actually it will affect it's apparent performance but makes no difference to real performance). Play the game for a while and see if that fixes the issues. (make sure that you make a mental note of the changes you make shoudl you need to undo them) I did the same thing under Windows 2000 and it appears to have fixed the problem. Now if we can just convince the game team to add some code to ensure the cache is committed (might i suggest a closefile() or a dozen just to make sure).

PS> This was with the latest demo. I'm still waiting for my full version to arrive. ;P

I had this same problem under Windows 2000. Have not experienced it at all under Windows 98 (same hardware, blah blah blah). I'm a developer myself and I've seen this happen with VSAM and proprietary data files (Access, Paradox, etc etc) when write behind cacheing did not full flush it's buffers. I just disabled the setting on my hard drives and am about to give it a whirl. Btw, this error manifests itself as an unhandled exception in windows 2000 and as an out of memory error under windows 98 (once the save game is munged windows 98 can't load it either). I debugged into the break point using visual studio's debugger and it appears to be a null/invalid pointer causing the issue. I'll let you know