Well... i was able to host for quite some time yesterday. I left the machine on all night and upon wakening was greeted by the now infamous "blue screen of death" Normally I get a message saying that irq_less_than_or_equal and then it gives the name of the video card driver. This time, it said my video driver had entered an endless loop.
Ive tried using only microsoft signed drivers, ive tried the detonator drivers (several versions and even the beta's) and I even pulled this video card out (nvidia vanta clone) and used the onboard 810 video card. I still have the problem with the onboard video. Thing is...I dont even have to be playing aces for it to happen, i can be out on the desktop doing other things and it can still occur. (aces is running in background then)
I never had this dag blasted trouble until I switched to windows XP pro.
The thing that blows my mind is that the trouble occurs almost immediately when I use the Mindanao terrain. All I have to do with it is alt-tab to the desktop and then upon returning to aces I get a blue screen of death. If I just let it sit and run with mindanao as the selected terrain, and I dont alt-tab, it still occurs in less that 5 minutes with that terrain. The only success I have is with the very small terrains which have what I think are the default textures.
I wish I could explain this better. Here is what I am running:
Celeron 633 (emachine junk with a cognac motherboard)
128 mb ram
nvidia vanta video card (16mb)
windows xp pro
prolly not much help, but i figured i would include it anyway.
thanks.