Quiting AH Hangs Game

[SJ001]

Hi guys, I am a returning player, trying to get back into it.

I have a problem that I have searched through the forums and cant find an answer.

AH freezes when I click 'Quit' in the game and sometimes I get a random error "AH has stopped working etc." when I start the game.

Ive never had this before in  previous years... Any ideas?

Here is my DXDiag www.steviejack.net/dxdiag.txt

I have 4 monitors and run AH on 3 of them but I have tried running a single monitor and it still occurs so that's not it.

Any help is appreciated

[SJ001]

Ok, oddly enough I just seen the loading message "you can press Alt+F4 to instantly quit"...

I knew about Alt + F4 but haven't tried till now and it works, exits game just fine.

I guess I'll use this method each time until another solution comes along.

[Bizman]

At least it's not because of an underpowered computer!

I'm not an expert in reading dxdiag outputs, but I think that your pagefile usage was quite high. How many background processes do you have running?

[SJ001]

Thanks for the reply, I try to kill anything I don't need but there's about 30 processes running, 10 to 15 are for hardware like mouse, keyboard and evga precision for auto fan control. I have Malware bytes and Norton running but I have also turn them off briefly to test and it still occurs. I should have enough mem to handle almost anything.

To add, I just flew for about an hour and had a freeze in mid air, I could still hear the engine sound but nothing else, I couldn't kill the process either, very weird, I had to reboot.

Puzzled...

[SJ001]

I just ran DXDiag after a boot without running any DX applications like AH, Page File: 4152MB used, 44942MB available, before it was 5150MB and that was after running AH. I have the paging file size fixed to 16384MB, this is based on the 32GB ram.

I'll run Performance Monitor and keep an eye open.

[The Fugitive]

You said the "N" word ", Norton's, I feel dirty just typing it. On some systems Nortons is worst than a virus all by its self. A freeze could happen as Nortons checks a file to decide whether to infect.... err I mean pass it as ok 

Try running for a bit with out Nortons running. This will be very difficult to do as getting Nortons to stop running, even hidden in the background is tough to do.

[Bizman]

30 processes is OK for Win7, over 4000 MB in page file not. The "N" word... or worse: is it possible that you have remains of some other antivirus competing with norton?

[SJ001]

I temporally disabled the machines virtual memory and the problem persists also DXDiag still reports 3655MB page file, not sure I understand that.

Ive reset virtual memory to 512 - 1024, I don't know if i want to think this is a page file size issue, I think it shows a large page file simply because of the size of ram, unsure though.

Anyway, it isn't a huge deal now that I use Alt + F4 to exit the game, Ive only had one in flight freeze so far, maybe that will not repeat, if it does I'll report back.

Thanks

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Oh please the guy has 32 gig of ram and you worry about the amount of processes he runs? And virtual memory? Windows allocates a share of swap automatically based on the amount of ram in the machine, that's why the pagefile is so large. It may never get used with that amount of ram - it doesn't matter if it's large or small and most certainly messing with it will only result in more problems.

Has AH been production tested with 32 gigabytes of ram? That is one possible cause of problems. It's not unheard of to run into bugs at large memory addresses. So try removing half of your ram and see if the crashing continues.

Another possible source of trouble is you're running SLI. As we know, AH is not horribly compatible with SLI and Nvidia has had its share of driver problems. Try running SLI disabled to see if the crashes continue.

Third possible problem is the SLI settings - I noticed that card 1 had a native resolution of 1080p but the other 1600x1200. I don't know if this is normal when running SLI. You would think the resolutions should match if the cards are connected.

To the OP: Do not start to disable _anything_ especially the virtual memory. You can set the memory size to a fixed 4 gigs if you want for example but do not disable it. Some programs may crash without the pagefile even if you have loads of ram and you don't want that unnecessary problem for yourself. Especially when there's zero to no benefit in speed disabling it.

All in all the problems are most likely caused by the Norton antivirus. It is not (I repeat not) enough to just 'turn it off'. Norton has to be completely uninstalled using the special uninstaller found on the Norton website https://support.norton.com/sp/en/en/home/current/solutions/kb20080710133834EN_EndUserProfile_en_us . Untill you do that, the system hooks and background processes Norton uses are still in place and cause system instability.

This affects anyone who ever accidentally or not, installed Norton on their computers.

[Bizman]

Sorry, Rip. As I said, I'm no expert in reading dxdiag outputs.

The reason I mentioned the pagefile was not how big it was, I was wondering how much of it was in use.

Page File: 5150MB used, 43943MB available

With 32 GB RAM the pagefile usage should be quite modest even with Windows using it no matter how much RAM is installed.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Sorry, Rip. As I said, I'm no expert in reading dxdiag outputs.

The reason I mentioned the pagefile was not how big it was, I was wondering how much of it was in use.  With 32 GB RAM the pagefile usage should be quite modest even with Windows using it no matter how much RAM is installed.

The pagefile is not used just because the system runs out of ram. Data is flushed there in certain situations, depending on how programs are coded. So I wouldn't worry about the pagefile usage.

[Chalenge]

Not likely to be SLI if he has more than a single monitor either way.

[SJ001]

Hi Guys, I have only 1 single video Card, its an Nvidia 780Ti with 4 inputs, three 27" screens (5760x1080) and a 4th screen to monitor Team Speak, card Temps etc... the 4th monitor is the 1600x1200. I have disabled PhysX and only used one 27" screen, Ive also used all default settings in the cards control panel, the problem persists.

I know a lot of people hate Norton, but I have trusted it for years and never had trouble except when i had a slow PC, I run many apps and games and never once had Norton caused an issue. If it is causing an issue now I'll live with it, with respect, I am not putting my PC at risk to be able to click the quit button, I have read about common problems that Norton may cause with games, firewall configuration, high processor usage and being a resource hog, I have no issue with any of these, if there is something more specific I am open to ideas.

I like the idea of removing some ram but not sure I want to go that far either, but I may the next time I clean my machine. if it is a ram issue I wonder what process Alt + F4 is bypassing, or for that matter why Norton would treat it any different.

It could be skipping an AH clean up process while closing, I didn't see any red flags with Resource Monitor or Performance Monitor.

To recap...
1) I get an error that AH has stopped working when starting AH about 1 in 10 starts (When clicking OK to enter selected arena).
2) I have never successfully clicked 'Quit' and it not freeze up (Alt + F4 works fine though).
3) I had only 1 single in flight game freeze where I had to reboot, couldn't (Alt + Ctrl + Delete) or anything, had to power off.

Thanks for the help!

[Chalenge]

The best thing you can do is peruse through the system logs and sort out what Windows is trying to tell you. Windows is pretty good about telling you which processes are slow to start, and slow to close, but you do have to do a little detective work sometimes. It is worth a looking into and a good spit polish to get it sorted out before it leads to bigger issues.

[Bizman]

The pagefile is not used just because the system runs out of ram. Data is flushed there in certain situations, depending on how programs are coded. So I wouldn't worry about the pagefile usage.

Thanks, I stand corrected. As a matter of fact I just took a look at my pagefile after viewing a couple of hours Youtube videos and noticed that mine had gone up to 2.5 GB. Apparently something that only can be cured by a reboot - which I still believe is a good thing to do before starting a gaming session.