DDO client crashing after 5 to 7 minutes in game

[BearLakeBoy]

I had a hard drive crash about two months ago and had to rebuild the hard drive from backups. Since that time, I have been plagued by the DDO client crashing after about 5 to 7 minutes of play. Often, it crashes to BSOD, but most of the time it just goes to the desktop. After re-booting in the former case or restarting DDO in the latter, I am able to play for as long as I like without further crashes. Has anyone else been experiencing this kind of event, and does anyone know of a common cause? It seems almost like there is a buffer somewhere that fills up and dumps me, but I don't know the mechanics of getting out of that situation. I have looked at my event logs and I cannot find anything with a DDO label that would correspond to these crashes. I am running on Windows 8.1 an Intel i7 960 PC without overclocking. I have 12 Gb of RAM.

Thanks, all.

[DakDeFrosted]

Welcome to DDO, just be happy it only crashes once.

[Missing_Minds]

I had a hard drive crash about two months ago and had to rebuild the hard drive from backups. Since that time, I have been plagued by the DDO client crashing after about 5 to 7 minutes of play.

Two things come to mind.

1. corrupted files. Re download/install the game fresh.
2. graphic card overheating.

[sebastianosmith]

I had a hard drive crash about two months ago and had to rebuild the hard drive from backups.

...corrupted files. Re download/install the game fresh.

That would be my first, best guess as well. It may even be an issue with one of the several support libraries - DX, VC+ 2k10, etc. Also, try Wanesa's DDO Preloader when starting the game. If there's a problem with one of the DAT files, that should make it apparent much faster.

Often, it crashes to BSOD, but most of the time it just goes to the desktop. After re-booting in the former case or restarting DDO in the latter, I am able to play for as long as I like without further crashes.

How odd. Does it have the same behavior given a cold start, as in the computer is completely off (not sleeping or hibernating) before your fire it up and play DDO? Check your application and system logs to see if some service is failing or timing out on start about when the game crashes.

Best of luck!

[BearLakeBoy]

Thanks for the rapid responses, all. Just an FYI, I did complete new install after the restoration, and have deleted and re-downloaded DDO since that event. The behavior of my computer is unchanged so far. I will try the cold boot before play method and see if that makes any difference. I think the most frustrating thing about the timing of the crashes is that it gives me enough time to ship buff, transport to dungeon area, log in and meet the first mob, then crashes during or immediately after the fight. Thought it might be something to do with the fight, so I held off on engagements and the crash still happened. Will keep trying, and studying the crash logs, although they seem to be disappointing so far.

My thanks once again.

[sebastianosmith]

Hey BearLakeBoy,

I was looking about for some more answers to this problem and ran across an interesting phenomenon very similar to yours. It would appear that some bluetooth and USB-based wireless devices can cause DX games to crash or bluescreen when they power down, sleep or generate a "Fully Charged" event. The specific devices mentioned where wireless game controllers and tablets or certain models of BT headsets. I don't know that this is applicable to your problem, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.

I hope you get this resolved.

[Chai]

Hey BearLakeBoy,

I was looking about for some more answers to this problem and ran across an interesting phenomenon very similar to yours. It would appear that some bluetooth and USB-based wireless devices can cause DX games to crash or bluescreen when they power down, sleep or generate a "Fully Charged" event. The specific devices mentioned where wireless game controllers and tablets or certain models of BT headsets. I don't know that this is applicable to your problem, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.

I hope you get this resolved.

Check the system for a wacom driver. If it exists, uninstall it as a troubleshooting step.

BSOD can happen if an operation the video driver is performing times out. Update the driver using the download from the manufacturers web site, or if it is updated, roll it back a version. Doing this a few times allowed me to find which driver was working best on my system.

[haulindonkey]

I am having the same type of problem. I open inventory or click on a window and *POOF* the dndclient closes in a split second with no warning and just kicks me out to the windows desktop. I have this problem on two different computers - a dell tower with windows XP and a Toshiba laptop running windows 7. A third computer, a Toshiba laptop that is older than the other one and running win 7 for some reason hasn't had this issue, but this one is the slowest for running DDO and not running DDO as much on it I may just not have run across the issue. Please help!! I have reinstalled DDO completely on the tower and I just had the insta-crash *POOF* as if I were running in windows mode and clicked X to exit the game or ended the process tree for DDO - this time it happened while clicking on the auction house window in-game.

As far as the suggestions above in this thread:
1) The crash seems to happen on my tower and laptop even soon after startup, so I doubt the overheating is a problem
2) I have reinstalled DDO on the tower and my first time in *POOF* insta-crash to desktop I do not get the BSOD, just always dumps me to desktop as if I had exited the program but very fast
3) Using the preloader on both computers
4) I have not tried Chai's suggestion but am in the process of implementing now on the tower