when i've tried to load games recently i've been encountering a really irritating crash that leads to the game exiting - it says something like 'character assertion data failure in ChType 250' - this has made many saves useless - i've now lost another lot of progress today. any ideas what it could be? i've got the latest direct x, graphic card drivers and patches for shadows of amn and ToB. i'm beginning to get fed up with the number of bugs this game has - it really is amongst the worst i've played for these probs - it's a real shame. any help would be appreciated - cheers!

You ever played daggerfall? now theres a bugged game. anyway, i would try restarting the game from sctratch. you might want to try re-installing the game first though, it is probably easier.

From the error message id guess that something about one of your characters has been corrupted beyond the games ability to recover.

You might also want to use ShadowKeeper to examine your chracters and see if theres anything weird in their, although youd have to know a fair amount of the infinity engine to determine if something is an error or wierd but correct.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

restart? but i'm at the end! sudansellar on my first run through! nooooooooo!

I used to have similar problems till I figured out what the problem was. Did you recently copy your saved files to another directory or cd by any chance. That was my problem. I saved everything (including my saved games of BG) to a CDRW while I re-formatted my computer. When I re-installed my game and imported my saved files, I kept getting errors. I tracked it down to the read/write attributes of the files. I'm not sure at the moment what they're supposed to be but if you play around you could probably figure it out.
The game also has to be installed exactly the same as before. With BG1 I tried to reinstall game and saves but it didn't work because i didn't intall TOTSC as i had when my games were actually saved. Once TOTSC was installled, it worked fine.

Hope all tis help

i'll give it a try. its come about after 5 days after ToB being installed. cheers for the suiggestion though!

no luck with the save game properties - damn! i think i'll have to give the helpline tomorrow a slightly angry call as i've now found out it's wiped out all my goes in sudansellar...hmmmmmmmmmm.

THe attribute thing would probably be down to the Read-only attribute. hidden file and archive probably woudnt matter.

Cheesus, you probably want to back-up any savse you do still have left, before you lose them all. then re-install and pray.

well, i kida of sorted it out - i turned my graphic card or 3d or whatever its called off under the options and it loaded up - hmmmmmmm. it seems even having the latest drivers doesn't help to avoid some probs - it must have been upgrading direct x that did it in the end for me. so even if it seems like an error is a game problem rather than hardware, try what i did - it might help!