Has anyone had this Error Message before?

[stikkypixie]

Error Message: STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER (Q293078)

I think I posted about this before, but lately CMBB and CMAK keeps crashing. I have mailed Madmatt and he send me here. I know this isn't a very common error. If anyone can help I'd appreciate it, if not I can live with the occasional crash.

I have an AMD athlon XP 2600, 512 Mb RAM, and I'm using a Geforce FX 5600.

I am currently using the 66.77 (it crashes the least with this one) version of the drivers.

Thanks in advance.

Ps. one of the symptoms is that as if the picture is made of two transparents placed on each other and that one is shifted to one side, while the other to the other side.

[ April 16, 2005, 05:02 AM: Message edited by: stikkypixie ]

[Andrew Kulin]

Originally posted by stikkypixie:

Error Message: STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER (Q293078)

Sounds like you need to vacuum out your PC case!

Sorry - I couldn't resist.

Andrew

p.s. - No clue on this, but is your card/system set up in anyway for dual monitors (grasps at straw)

[stikkypixie]

I don't know, how do I check?

[Schrullenhaft]

This error indicates a problem with the video hardware per this Microsoft Knowledgebase article. Supposedly the display driver is caught in an infinite loop while it waits for the video hardware to become idle (the GPU is supposedly busy and can't service all of the draw/processing requests in a timely manner).

Microsoft suggests that you turn down the "hardware acceleration" or update to the latest drivers. However that is very generic advice. CM should be able to run fine with the latest GeForces and Forceware drivers, so the "advice" from Microsoft would seem unnecessary if everything was working as it should.

The relationship to the placing of "transparents" is this refering to overlapping occupied buildings in CM ? I'm not particularly aware of any alpha-blending bugs in the Nvidia drivers.

What motherboard do you have and have you installed the chipset (AGP) drivers for it ? Do you know if you've made any changes to AGP settings in the CMOS ? Have you made any changes beyond the defaults in the GeForce FX5600 tab within the Display control panel ?

My assumption here is that something else is wrong. Though it may be a setting that others can use, it is possible that your motherboard/video combination may have issues with certain settings that may be producing your problem. Unfortunately it will probably take a lot of guesses and reboots to eventually find the culprit.

[stikkypixie]

I don't know which motherboard I have, is there a way I can tell.

And as far as I'm aware I haven't touched, anything except updating my drivers. I usually try to avoid that.

The transparent thing is hard to explain, so bear with me (but it doesn't have anything to do with overlapping houses):

You take a picture, and divide it in little vertical strips. The odd ones you copy on one transparent, the even ones on another. So if you put them on top of each other you get a normal picture.

What sometimes happen with CM looks like if the two transparent aren't align correctly.

[Jev.Dk]

You can find out your hardware with this

program (SiSoft Sandra 2004 Service Pack 2 Benchmarking utility)

/Jev

[stikkypixie]

Processor

Model : AMD Athlon XP 2600+

Speed : 2.08GHz

Model Number : 2600 (estimated)

Performance Rating : PR3020 (estimated)

Type : Standard

L2 On-board Cache : 256kB ECC Synchronous Write-Back (16-way, 64 byte line size)

Mainboard

Bus(es) : ISA AGP PCI USB i2c/SMBus

MP Support : 1 CPU(s)

MP APIC : No

System BIOS : American Megatrends Inc. P1.30

System : American Megatrends Inc. Uknown

Mainboard : K7S8X

Total Memory : 511MB DDR-SDRAM

Chipset 1

Model : ASRock Inc SiS746 CPU to PCI Bridge

Front Side Bus Speed : 2x 167MHz (334MHz data rate)

Total Memory : 512MB DDR-SDRAM

Memory Bus Speed : 2x 200MHz (400MHz data rate)

Video System

Monitor/Panel : COMPAQ 1520 Flat Panel Monitor

Adapter : NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600

[Schrullenhaft]

Are you using some other program other than CM when this error occurs with the transparency ?

The first thing I would suggest is to download and install the SiS AGP (GART) Driver (select Chipset software > AGP (GART) Driver > then your particular Windows OS; Taiwan might also be a good selection for the country download since their FTP server seems the most responsive).

When you reboot the next time go into the CMOS/BIOS setup and go to the Advanced Menu. In there check that your AGP Aperture Size is set to 128Mb or more (or whatever the max may be if it is less than this). Also check the settings for Primary Graphics Adapter (should be AGP), AGP Data Rate (which should be 8X or if it is you can experiment with 4X), AGP Fast Write (your FX6500 should support this, but you can experiment with it off to see if that helps). Other settings such as DRAM Frequency and DRAM CAS Latency can affect performance and stability (though I don't know if they would have a specific effect on this particular problem).

You can also update the BIOS to version 2.6, though there is no mention of Nvidia AGP card compatibilities (the AGP driver in this listing is older than what is on the SiS website).

You may also want to uninstall your video drivers completely (going back to whatever default may be offered) and then installing a newer Nvidia driver. But first install the SiS AGP driver and check the CMOS/BIOS settings.

[stikkypixie]

As far as I know I don't have any problems like those from CM with other games (because I don't play any other).

All this BIOS tinkering seems very difficult for a novice like me, so I probably won't touch drivers or anything like that. Don't worry if the problem can't be solved without tinkering with complicated stuff like that then no problem, I can live with a crash no and then.

I will check the Aperture size, and the other settings of 5600 next time I reboot.

Btw how do I check these things?

[Schrullenhaft]

Tinkering with your driver is probably what may fix this issue. As for the CMOS/BIOS setup, you access that when you first boot or reboot the computer; during the memory count you need to press the Delete key (the most common, some motherboards use F1, etc.). This will get you into your CMOS/BIOS setup. Things like your hard drive settings and time are set here along with other more complicated settings. The Advanced menu is where you want to go to check out the settings I mentioned above.

This issue however seems to be more related to your drivers or some other software setting or environmental condition (the software environment). You may need to find out exactly what you're running in the background while you play CM (doing a Ctrl-Alt-Del and clicking on the Task Manager button should get you some tabs to examine your software environment).

Installing the SiS AGP driver would be highly recommended too. This can sometimes alleviate some compatibility problems or just make things run smoother (in regards to the videocard). Windows XP probably has a generic driver already installed for this, but the latest from SiS would probably be a bit better.

[stikkypixie]

Ok, I might give it a try (the SIS drivers). Is it hard? I mean all I have to do is double click an exe file right?

And if necessary can system restore, restore the system?

And if I check my software environment, what should I look for?

[ April 18, 2005, 03:31 AM: Message edited by: stikkypixie ]

[Schrullenhaft]

The SiS AGP drivers are actually a ZIP file that needs to be extracted first. Inside the directory of what gets extracted should be a SETUP.EXE file that you can run that should install all of the necessary files and settings.

In your 'software environment' you should try to close down as many running programs/processes as possible. Close down most of the icons (programs) running in the System Tray in the lower right hand corner of the desktop. Also close down the obvious, such as programs running in the Taskbar (the bottom of the screen). Do a Ctrl-Alt-Del and click on the Task Manager button that pops up. In the Programs tab there should be nothing running before you launch CM. In the Processes tab you'll have a large list of running processes, these include programs and other utilities that are running seen and unseen. Several of these processes can't be closed (since they're the OS). Processes such as SVCHOST.EXE (there will be multiple instances of this running, which is normal), CTFMON.EXE, SERVICES.EXE, LSASS.EXE, WINLOGON.EXE, SMSS.EXE, ALG.EXE (if you're running the Windows Firewall in XP), SYSTEM, SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS, SPOOLSV.EXE and EXPLORER.EXE. Almost anything else can be or should be closed down (by clicking the 'End Process' button) before attempting to run CM. It's not that all of these processes are interfering with CM, but we want to see if anyone of these processes is causing the problem.

If CM still crashes (and hopefully you've found a consistent way to make it crash or troubleshooting becomes much more hit and miss) with most non-essential processes/programs closed down, then there may be either a hardware problem or a driver problem.

[stikkypixie]

This got me thinking, I installed a new anti-virus around the period the crashes began.

I'll uninstall it, and see what happens.

Hopefully it's something this trivial.

[stikkypixie]

I installed the SIS drivers and will test for a few weeks. I'll post an update then.

Anyway thanks for the help everyone, especially Schrullenhaft, who seem to be the resident computer guru .

[stikkypixie]

Ok, this how I stand now. I installed the SIS drivers and the 71.89 drivers and CM still crashed. I can't crash CM consistently, but I reverted back to 66.77, everything *seems* to be going fine (sometimes CM hangs up a bit, but no crashes). When I play the game I run it with a minimum of background software (no anti-virus, no firewall, etc...).

I did managed to make a screenshot of the symptom that I talked about above. This is a lesser form, but I used to get something like this.

screenshot

So things appear to be OK, but I still wonder what that the heck is going on.

Thanks in advance

[Schrullenhaft]

It looks like some sort of texture corruption in video memory. Does this problem happen every time you have snow and buildings in the scenario or in the 'Finland' region, etc. ?

It would seem to be a driver problem more than anything. If you want to pursue this further, I'd suggest uninstalling your current video driver from the Add or Remove Programs control panel (you'll see a 'Nvidia Driver' listing in there); make sure to close down as many running programs/processes before doing this. If you happen to have other video drivers (a previous videocard perhaps), uninstall those too. Also before doing this make sure you have the video driver version you want to install downloaded already (for convenience). If the uninstall doesn't force you to reboot immediately, run Driver Cleaner Professional (which you'll of course need to download prior to performing the uninstall). If you are forced to reboot, then just run this program after the reboot. This program should hopefully get rid of any files or registry settings that may be causing problems. After this restart Windows. Windows will detect and ask for drivers, but just cancel this process. Again, close down any running programs/processes (including anti-virus utilities, etc.) and then run the video driver installer for the version you want to use (you seem to be having the least problems with 66.77, so you'll probably want to try that).

Hopefully what should happen here is that you'll get a fresh install of the video drivers with no previous (or possibly later) versions of any files or registry settings. It's a possibility (though somewhat slight) that some older or newer file is still present on the system when you updated/downgraded your video drivers and this may be causing some problems with the currently installed drivers.

I'm not sure if any of your video settings for the Nvidia drivers could cause potential problems here or not. The defaults should typically work fine (since most features are turned off in CM's case).

One last thing to try, if you have the disk space, is to install a fresh, unmodded copy (in a different location) of CMBB; though I suggest patching it to v. 1.03. Though I wouldn't imagine that your 128Mb videocard would have its video memory swamped with textures it couldn't handle, it might just be a good base-level test of the system to make sure this isn't a case of the textures themselves having problems.

[ April 26, 2005, 08:24 AM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[Redwolf]

I had a similar looking texture messup when I was using some beta test drivers with my NVidia card. After updating to the latest official drivers the problem went away.

So yes this is most likely drivers.

[hoolaman]

I do not recognise the error message, but I would suggest that it may actually be a hardware problem. The only time crazy display malfunctions such as those pictured happen to me is when my system RAM (often) or video card (three times over the years) is dying.

One remedy I use which the experts may scoff at is to phsyically remove your video card and put it back in again. This works reliably for my RAM troubles, maybe will for your video issues.

The Microsoft website also suggests possible hardware troubles.

Microsoft support