After the game loads up, the news window pops up on the right as usual, but the menu buttons never appear, or rather, they can't since the game freezes - I can't close the News window or open up the console either. If I join a game with Steam's "Servers", it freezes at about 1/5 of the "Connecting" progress bar. Can't cancel out. What I've tried to do: For Empires? Nothing yet, really. It's late and I can't be bothered, but bear with me here. Earlier today, I started up L4D2 and it's doing something very similar (worked fine yesterday). It loads up, the main menu works for a few seconds, and then freezes, with a second of the atmospheric BGM constantly looping. What I've tried to do (for L4D2): -novideos in launch options Deleted a client.something file and revalidated game files Tried a registry file that fixed it for some people, apparently Prayed to Gabe Nothing worked though. Anyone have a clue?
It's a long shot, but try disabling every plugin in IE. If you use that as your main browser, don't. Sometimes IE can interact with any HTML in any source games pretty weirdly and fuck shit up. Also any extra applications that interact with IE as well. Internet Download Manager is one of them, where you had to turn off any integration with IE. I doubt it will fix it but it's the best I have.
Pray to gabe more. But seriously though, so the traditional steam reinstallation. The nuclear option is tedious, but there's a high chance of success.
Only got stock IE8 installed, no plugins for it at all. It's not set as default either, Chrome's got that covered. I kind of need it though, rather my mom does for work. There's some pretty important online banking stuff she has that only works with IE... blame lazy devs, I guess. Though, what are the odds of those being the "plugins" you mentioned earlier? Just nuked and reinstalled Steam, the "delete everything but Steam.exe and steamapps" method. Didn't help. I could try nuking the game itself... I'll do that next and report if it changes anything. Will do.
Yeah, that didn't do anything. In the meanwhile, I also tried turning off Cloud and Steam ingame Community, but... nothing. Guess I'll just keep praying to Gabe, I'm all out of ideas... EDIT: Are you frustrated? (link) Note: The News window loads fine sometimes. Hell, I even got the menu buttons to faintly appear once. Still doesn't work though. Loving that 99% CPU use.
It's about the only thing that works on a 7 year old PC, bwahahahah All files validated successfully. No change. Also did SSDKB 06.
True, but where's the fun in that? I want to figure out why this is happening. (Truth be told though, it would be more fun if I could play...) And, if someone else happens upon the same issue, it'd be nice if we could suggest a fix other than "Axe your hard drive, that'll make the game work". More stuff I've tried (It's mostly trivial crap, but I figure I should keep some sort of a record): Uninstalled L4D2 Installed Half Life 2 and HL Source - They work fine! Updated display drivers Nuked Steam a second time over. Axed IE8, taking it a step further from what Trickster suggested. Just ended up reinstalling since it did nothing though. Disabled Tunngle Network Adapter... huh? How would that affect anything? Played with some of the stuff suggested in the Tech Support sticky, heapsize and paged memory to be precise. Nothing, though.
what kind of cpu is in your 7 year old pc? If its an Athlon XP, you won't be able to run empires. You need a CPU that supports SSE2.
Done and done, also tried reinstalling dotNET Framework 3.5. No dice. Athlon 64. According to CPU-Z it's got SSE2/3 support. Would be weird if that was it since I've been playing for years now (ignoring the fact that I never bothered to register on the forums, heh).
Twelve days now. Is this what they call withdrawal? It's a SDK Base 2007 problem, that much I'm sure of by now. B07 itself freezes on "Loading". I've also tried downloading the sourcemod "No More Room in Hell", also requires B07. Freezes on main menu just like Empires does. pls help ;_;
Did you let it brew for some time? I once had a slightly different problem (bloody thing froze for a few minutes because of creating some caches) and it resolved itself after a while.
Would 30 minutes be enough? It just sits there in the "Not responding" state, completely stops using CPU and memory after a minute or so.
Ran Empires today, it magically works now. I have no idea what I did or when I did it and I hate that fact.