BF2 1.3 Crash Story

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

Well, you've probably reading this because you have a crash in Battlefield 2 (BF2) after having installed BF2 patch 1.3. First I must say that I still cannot play BF2 but my story may lead to some clues which may help you.

Well, here's the story...

After 3 months of waiting for a repair of my Geforce 7800 GFX video graph card I finally got it back in June (this is a story for itself, but I won't go into it) and anticipated to play BF2 again.

I downloaded and installed the full 1.3 path. I started up and successfully played a few maps of it. Everything okay it seemed.

After a few days off the computer I tried to play again and this time I couldn't even start BF2. It simply crashed. On my computer entirely - i.e. rebooting, while others are reporting simply crash to desktop (or CTD as it is abbreviated). So I couldn't start BF2. It did it every time.

I started my investigation and a lot of try outs that involved combinations of the following:

• Clean install - with full 1.3 patch.
• Clean install - with successive installs of all incremental patches up to 1.3
• Reverting to an older version of NVIDIA Display Drivers. I'm switching between 81.91 and the newest (present time 91.31).
• Uninstalling NVIDIA sound drivers.
• Renaming BF2.EXE to BF2X.EXE and executing this instead. This is to avoid the display driver applications settings to tune the display drivers for BF2. (There was some success with this, but only sporadically).
• Installed driver fix for safedisc - a tool for protecting BF2 from being played without the original DVD in the DVD player.
• Cleaning (deleting all files) in the C:\Windows\Prefetch folder to remove the preload files for applications - and especially the one used for the safedisc (named ~E5.0001-0C1D5B85.pf) 

It didn't matter whether I installed the full 1.3 patch or the incrementals successively. This was not my cause to the problem.

I found that a combination of an old NVIDIA driver (I'm now running 81.98) and the cleaning of the prefetch folder helped every time. I could start BF2 without problems and I'm able to login and see the game servers etc.

This may suggest that patch 1.3 has been updated to include a newer generation of protection (possible safedisc) or a bad installer which does not probably clean-up previous versions of safedisc, i.e. this is resolved by my manually cleaning of the prefetch folder. Why it is necessary to use an older version of the NVIDIA drivers is beyond my understanding.

It's interesting to observe that the first time - directly after installing patch 1.3 - I played successfully without problems for hours. But some days later I could not! Evidently I restarted my computer since the first successfully gaming experience. Did I install something in between (e.g. drivers or applications)? Could be and most likely, but I don't remember exactly what.

However when I now join a server and a map starts loading I get a crash. It only reaches a few 1-2 percent map loading time when it crashes.

This problem remains yet to be resolved and I'm not able to play BF2 1.3.  Can this be caused by some kind of copy protection or what? I'm not certain that my problem will be resolved in the upcoming 1.4 patch. I hope so, because I have greatly enjoyed playing BF2 at the time I was able to, and I hope that can will be able to do it again.

Needless to say I'm running on a fully valid and legal version of BF2. Also I can play other games (e.g. FEAR) without any problems (so it's not the video card).

Update 9 September, 2006:  I have the same problems after applying patch 1.4 .

Update ultimo October, 2006: Finally up and running again with BF2. Installed Vista RC2 and BF2, patched to 1.4 and everything worked as long as you run BF2 as an administrator (due to Punkbuster). The original problem on XP must be a driver issue.

If you aren't already aware of it, you should take a look at the the official BF2 Community Tech FAQ which do contains possible resolutions to technical problems.